This chapter explores China’s engagement with international law from the nineteenth century to the 1940s. It examines China’s transition from its traditional world view to acceptance of and participation in international law. Despite the encounter with Western powers in the nineteenth century, China maintained its traditional world view. After the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 China began to change its stance, culminating in the establishment of the Republic of China, which embraced international law. Using Confucianism and the concept of tianxia, the chapter examines how Chinese civilization influenced China’s engagement with international law. It also explores how Chinese civilisation contributed to a more inclusive international legal order in the early twentieth century. Ultimately, the chapter aims to demonstrate the continuing relevance of Chinese civilisation in shaping China’s international legal practice and the international legal order as a whole in the twenty-first century.

‘Black Athena/Black Athenians’? At the dawning of the Age of ‘European supremacy’, intellectuals preceding Martin Bernal engaged in the reclamation of Africa and its role in the world. This argument takes up these concerns in four sections. Section 14.2 considers Bernal and the work of his predecessors who engaged questions of a diverse and inclusive antiquity that included peoples of African descent. Section 14.3 focuses on Phillis Wheatley and her genius in harnessing classical allusion as a poetic device and revolutionary speech. Section 14.4 focuses on the redefinition and reframing of Egypt and Egyptians, and Ethiopia and Ethiopians in relation to classical discourses and their employment in Black revolutionary conceptualisations from the beginnings of the American Republic through the post-Reconstruction period. In Section 14.5, the overlooked scholarship on antiquity of historically Black colleges and universities is engaged as a marker of the long history of challenges to White supremacy.

The city of Colossae (Kolossai) belonged to the region of ancient Phrygia and could be found in the Lycus Valley. Located in western Anatolia (modern Türkiye/Turkey), Phrygia was an old and distinct territory with its own culture, language, and religion centuries before the arrival of Rome. Phrygia’s home was originally along the Sakara (Saggarios; Latin Saggarius) River in northwest Anatolia, and its civilization peaked in the eighth century BCE, extending far south beyond Colossae. Major empires conquered it, from the Persians to Alexander the Great to even the Celtic tribal warlords who had migrated from the north. Each conqueror desired to control the trade routes running east to west. Centuries before Paul, the Persian Xerxes the Great camped near Colossae on his way to Greece, as did the Persian Cyrus. Herodotus says that Xerxes arrived at Colossae and described it as a “considerable city of Phrygia” (Herodotus 7:30). Both saw the Lycus Valley as a strategic gateway to the west (see Map 1).

Allen Ginsberg taught Shelley’s notion of the poet as legislator and the Romantic ideologeme that art could save the world, and conceived of the poet as shaman. He heard his father recite Romantic verse daily for years before he learned to read. This informed his championing of poetry’s “aural renaissance,” in which he played a role. Ginsberg’s early exposure to the first blues recordings made him a lifelong aficionado who taught blues as poetry. Immersion with Kerouac and friends in the New York jazz scene of the 1940s–1950s informed his and Kerouac’s writing, as they adapted jazz – which they equated to “Black speech” – in their writing. The Beats’ synthesis of post-Whitmanic American poetics with the rhythms and inflections of African-American vernacular speech took that argot to the masses, and influenced the 1960s generation of rockers, in particular the two musical phenomena that would carry the Beat/Romantic vision into global mass culture: Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

The introduction discusses the ways in which Alejo Carpentier has been seen by critics over time. Showing that much has been said about the writer’s style and vision for a Latin America that is connected to the world, this chapter also discusses critiques of the writer’s unfailing support for the Cuban Revolution and a controversy surrounding his official biography. It further presents readers with the history of Carpentier’s editorial successes and the recent renaissance of interest in his work, and it showcases resources for further Carpentier research. It ends by briefly introducing the six-part division of the book and each of its contributions.

This chapter discusses the history and evolution of international intellectual property rights (IPRs) protection, focusing on the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement. It examines the justifications for and debates surrounding the extension of developed country-style IPRs to developing nations, as well as the TRIPS provisions themselves. The chapter also addresses the conflicts between TRIPS and other international regimes, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the significant public health concerns raised by TRIPS, particularly regarding access to essential medicines. Finally, it concludes by analysing the distributive impact of TRIPS and the challenges posed by emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.

This chapter examines ideas pertaining to the rational-discursive faculty and species difference that took shape within the discourses of medieval Judaism and Christianity. The chapter’s first section centers on two non-human animals described as speaking in the text of the Hebrew Bible: the serpent of the Garden of Eden and Balaam’s she-donkey. It argues that whereas works of serious exegesis by authors like Augustine and Maimonides downplayed the potentially radical significance of the talking done by these scriptural creatures, the medieval literary reimaginings of the same scenes indulged in drawing out the unorthodox implications of the non-human chatter. The chapter’s second part then considers Christian attitudes toward the naturalistic question of whether non-human animals outside the Bible actually do possess the rational-discursive faculty in some measure. Here, a clear progression can be observed over time: Despite the willingness of some early authors to humor this possibility, non-human animals gradually became barred from all conceptual access to rational thought.

This chapter uses the theoretical frameworks of racial formations, racecraft, and intersectionality to analyse the racial dimensions of the two accounts of the massacre of the Pelasgian men of Lemnos and their enslaved Thracian concubines by the Pelasgian women of Lemnos in Apollonius’ Argonautica. The chapter argues that the epic presents the Lemnian women’s actions as driven by their sense that the Pelasgian men had overturned the racial hierarchy of the island that had previously benefitted them. The Lemnian women’s violent resistance to their change of status is presented by the narrator as an overreaction prompted by sexual jealousy new sentence. But it is presented by Hypsipyle as the restoration of the ‘proper’ racial order. Intersectionality helps to tease out the different racial destinies of the two groups of non-Greek women on Lemnos. The free Pelasgian women are to be the mothers of racially superior sons, whereas the Thracian girls, as mothers of the racially inferior sons of the Pelasgians, are to be exterminated with them so that that Lemnos can fulfil its destiny to become the source of the Greek founders of Cyrene.

This chapter charts Alejo Carpentier’s connection with Mexico, from his momentous first visit in 1926, when he traveled to Mexico City as editor of Carteles, to his later friendships with major Mexican intellectuals, and including his publishing choices in the early and late phases of his career, (EDIAPSA; Fondo de Cultura Económica; Siglo Veintiuno). It focuses particularly on Carpentier’s friendship with Diego Rivera and his circle, as well as on his depictions of Mexicans living in 1920s Havana. This chapter describes Carpentier as part of a transnational community of intellectuals bonding over shared ideas on avant-garde art and politics. It argues that Mexican literary, visual and musical culture and the Mexican Revolution impacted Carpentier’s life deeply and shaped his vision of Latin America.

Current thinking views the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean as highly interconnected. This contrasts with late twentieth-century ideas of either geographically separate regions or more developed centers that dominated less complex peripheral societies. A major inspiration for the present approach is a post-processual understanding of the complex dimensions of consumption. Elite burial goods at Lefkandi ca. 1100–825 BCE illustrate how imports were used in status strategies. In the eighth century BCE, there is a decrease in valuable grave goods as dedications of imported luxury items in public sanctuaries became the preferred means of elite display. Current views also reflect postcolonial understanding of non-indigenous settlements as sites of hybridity and inbetweenness, not the imposition of a colonizing ethnicity on local identities but new cultural syntheses. Examples include a large number of the early so-called Greek colonies. A recently excavated example is L’Amastuola in Apulia, an indigenous settlement of the late eighth century where Greeks came to live in the early seventh century.