Friendship has its public life in urban spaces. Drawing on recent social constructionist approaches to the domestication of space in urban studies, and based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the outdoor spaces of a mall in Beijing, China, this chapter explores how ordinary visitors domesticate the mall in their everyday lives. Focusing on the practice of friendship in three small groups, I trace how the mall’s spaces are (1) appropriated as “playgrounds” by after-school children, (2) negotiated as “informal childcare workshops” by guardians, and (3) claimed as “senior centers” by elderly visitors. I argue that the mall is not merely a backdrop for friendship, but that friendship practices constitute the mall beyond its default setting as merely a space for consumption. This chapter contributes to scholarship on modern friendship beyond the private realm and advocates for a more embracing conceptualization of friendship in urban spaces.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Black press provided some of the most detailed accounts of Florence Price’s compositional activity. The Black press presented a counterinstitution to mainstream media and, as such, reported on Price with the awareness that her accomplishments would be experienced vicariously through a readership that encompassed much of the nation’s Black demographic. In comparison, coverage of Price’s work in the white-authored press is less extensive, and often superficial in tone – though it, too, offers crucial information about Price’s career. This chapter charts the relationship between Price and the Black press across multiple contexts, from her childhood in Little Rock through the apex of her compositional career to the final years of her life. In doing so, it highlights a perpetual tug-of-war that emerges in her critical reception: namely, a discourse that concomitantly exceptionalizes and de-exceptionalizes Price, emphasizing her distinctiveness as much as her embeddedness within Black institutional life.

This chapter examines the complex evolution of Irish Tory political thought during the 1830s and 1840s, revealing a more fluid and conditional unionism than traditional narratives suggest. Following the loss of their power base with the dissolution of the Irish Parliament in 1801, Irish Tories struggled to define their role in the new constitutional order, oscillating between staunch support for the Union and moments of profound disillusionment. The chapter analyses how figures like Sir Samuel Ferguson and contributors to the Dublin University Magazine articulated a distinctively Irish conservative vision that sought to reconcile traditional Protestant Ascendancy values with the realities of post-emancipation Ireland. Some Tories even briefly embraced the idea of restoring an Irish parliament as they witnessed the British government’s catastrophic failure of governance during the Famine. The chapter demonstrates how Irish Tory thought evolved from unconditional unionism to a more pragmatic position that viewed the Union as contingent upon its ability to deliver good government for Ireland, challenging the monolithic portrayal of conservatism in this period.

The servants in Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction, increasingly complex, allow her to represent, variously, Irishness (Donovan and his daughters in The Heat of the Day), the paid companion’s difficulties in living intimately with an employer (in several short stories), a housekeeper who maintains family memories with its furniture (Matchett in The Death of the Heart), and even a murderer who resents his position as a flunkey (Prothero in ‘The Disinherited’). These portrayals allow explorations of class loyalties, predicaments, and resentments, as well as subtleties of Irishness and Irish neutrality during the Second World War. This chapter examines paid companions, Irish help and their informal relationships with their employers, and morally forceful servants who contribute to the advancement of plot. Bowen’s servants often prompt their employers’ confrontation with the reality of their moral, social, or historical circumstances; by doing so, they can expose or puncture their employers’ illusions about their respective worlds.

This chapter offers a speculative account of Barbara Strozzi’s singing, her repertory, her vocal technique, and the ways in which her physical experience as a singer served as a catalyst for some of the most original features of her compositions. After noting the similarities between Giulio Strozzi’s glowing descriptions of Anna Renzi’s singing and his daughter’s compositions, I examine the two highly virtuosic pieces in Opus 2 dedicated to the soprano castrato Adam Franckh that reveal by comparison the special way in which Strozzi likely composed for her own voice—syllabic passages in the lower register, melismatic writing in the middle voice and upper middle voice with easy transitions from one to another register. Furthermore, I argue that her composition was inseparable from her physical experiences as a singer and captures something of the pleasurable sensations that she must have experienced as she explored the full potential of her own instrument.

Thirty years after his Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, Neruda’s three books of “elemental odes” (1954–57) refocused his poetry into the everyday things and the everyday life of the common people. This new type of poetry responded to an invitation by Miguel Otero Silva, the director of the Caracas journal El Nacional, for a weekly collaboration, which the poet envisioned as an opportunity to offer a chronicle of the daily life of his time, his people, and the everyday objects that surrounded them. This anecdote led the way for Neruda’s “impure” poetry to challenge the assumed range of topics for poetic discourse, beyond his reputation as a poet of love and politics, earned from his previous poetry collections. He began to write in a simpler way, as the “invisible man” who walks the streets talking to common people about their daily experience.

The first chapter places Coase, Pigou, and the US environmental policies examined in the volume in the broader context of the literature on the economics of institutional change. This academic research provides background for Coase and suggests the tradeoffs that emerge when decentralized approaches to economic problems are displaced by those of centralized regulation.

This chapter examines the rise of U.S. interest in the Nicaragua Canal in the context of the Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century as well as the beginning of a transatlantic rivalry between Great Britain and the United States over control of the canal route. This chapter illuminates how the status of the Mosquito Kingdom as an Indigenous polity became the crucial fulcrum around which this transatlantic rivalry operated so that the Mosquito question became inextricably linked to the Canal question at a time when the canal also became central to Nicaragua’s nationalist project and regional aspirations.

By asking how political communities are constructed and with what boundaries, this book has explored different conceptualizations of nation, different perceptions of territory and dynamics of unity and division. It has presented alternative notions of political community outside of the nation-state paradigm, in communities smaller than the state and going beyond the boundaries of the state. My work has devoted attention to the beginnings of political communities or to their reshaping processes. By establishing boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, these communities defined themselves at different levels: the local, regional, transnational and national levels. In the border region between Ghana and Togo, these political communities were built on top of each other, like a palimpsest, and intersected with the Ghanaian and Togolese states that used these dynamics to their advantage. This book endeavours to make us rethink the notion of the nation-state and its associated concepts in light of these dynamics: citizenship, elections, border and nation-state.

This chapter revisits “critical friendships,” exploring how moments of sociopolitical and health crises shape and challenge relational bonds. Drawing on UK-based studies of personal responses to Brexit and dating app use during COVID-19, we demonstrate that theoretical assumptions about friendship’s egalitarian and inherently “good” nature often fail to capture the complexities of lived experience. The Brexit study revealed how political differences strained friendships, yet participants often prioritized shared history over political alignment. The COVID-19 study found that while apps facilitated “suffused” relationships during lockdown, these relationships were ultimately disappointingly short-lived. Using Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” we demonstrate how the illusion of the ideal “pure” friendship creates an inevitable disappointment when such relationships prove unachievable. Yet despite these disappointments, the “goods” of friendship can still outweigh the “bads” of “the times” in the potential for new suffused relational forms, however fleeting, as well as in the effort expended to sustain friendships.