When considering the importance of France in Neruda’s life and works, scholars have chronicled up to nine separate visits, from the anecdotes of amorous adventures to a desperate search for political asylum, friendships and romances, forged and dissolved. This chapter studies the importance of France and its impact on the evolution of Neruda’s artistic values and production through the literary lens of key poems associated with five particular visits to France. Among other poems related to Neruda’s stay in France, this chapter focuses on references to Picasso in Las uvas y el viento (The Grapes and the Wind, 1952) and their collaboration in Toros (Bulls, 1960), where they express their shared love for and faith in Spain.

As business transactions and the global economy become increasingly digitalized, international investment disputes will deal with novel assets in new boundary-defiant contexts. Indeed, jurisdictional arguments and objections will likely require arbitral tribunals to confront with the uneasy task of delineating the ‘localization’ of investments in digital economy assets such as cryptocurrency, non-fungible tokens, and data-related investments. However, given that even more traditional assets have raised a variety of problems relating to territorial nexus and localization, the authors believe that the digital economy emphasizes what are essentially differences in degree rather than in kind. This chapter discusses the complexities that arise in considering the idiosyncrasies of investments in digital economy assets within a traditional territorially defined jurisdictional framework. First, the authors present some of those new digital economy assets and canvass several typical cross-border challenges inherent in international investment arbitration. Second, they question how traditional objections to jurisdiction ratione personae and jurisdiction ratione materiae might be employed when the investments in question relate to those digital developments. Third, the chapter raises questions about states’ jurisdiction to prescribe, and ponders the potential effects for purposes of jurisdiction of states asserting their authority to prescribe over investments or investors outside their territory.

While living in exile in a divided Berlin after the 1973 military coup and Pablo Neruda’s death twelve days later, Antonio Skármeta created his own version of Neruda in Ardiente paciencia (Burning Patience), a humane image of the poet that contrasted with the one-dimensional communist martyr projected after his death. Skármeta wrote the base story for four different media under the same title: a radio drama, a play, a film, and a novel. The story has since been freely adapted by others, such as Michael Radford’s film Il Postino (The Postman), Daniel Catán’s opera, with Plácido Domingo as Neruda, and Rodrigo Sepúlveda’s recent film released by Netflix. Aside from clarifying the confusion in the critical bibliography regarding these multiple stories, this chapter focuses on Skármeta’s two media versions of Ardiente paciencia, the play and the film, to show how a single artistic creation can captivate audiences worldwide.

Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, or White City, marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the “New World” and showcased Chicago’s ambition to be a modern metropolis. While Chicago’s architecture is often labeled as Beaux-Arts or Roman, this chapter argues that the architecture of its key buildings and central spaces embodied the bricolage of the neo-antique. The White City established neo-antique architecture as the preferred architectural idiom for American world’s fairs. This architecture also demonstrated that the United States was now a cultural, economic, and political powerhouse. The lasting impact of the White City’s architecture is evident in urban planning, especially in the City Beautiful movement and in civil buildings built after the fair. Other buildings at the fair, such as Haiti’s pavilion, also utilized classicizing architecture. For Haiti, the ideals of democracy and the cultural cachet of classical culture informed the choice of classical architecture here. Ancient Egyptian architecture also appeared in the form of a replica of the Temple of Luxor, located in the Midway Plaisance, the fair’s entertainment zone, aiming to educate and entertain visitors. The reception of ancient architecture at the White City reflects the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship between nineteenth-century America and the ancient world.

Chapter 8 looks at some of the ways local historians represented their region’s or town’s history and the ways they crafted narratives that placed their local, idealised communities within the history of wider communities. The chapter looks in particular at the ways local historians discussed the historical topography of their regions and towns, the ways they dealt with non-Muslim and pre-Islamic history, and the master narratives they used to build their communities’ histories, in particular the ways in which those narratives differed from the ones often encountered in universal histories. One overarching argument of the book, brought to the fore in this chapter, is that local history-writing was, in the early Islamic centuries at least, not always as distinct from universal history-writing as we are sometimes led to think; and that where differences can be seen, they often concerned the conception of community and the role of elites as much as whether a given work covers the history of one region much more thoroughly than others.

The Gulf has acquired land in Africa, Europe and elsewhere for the purpose of cultivating commodities. There is considerable debate about these enclosures, and this chapter examines how they are understood. It also examines the scale and nature of these land grabs and what determines their success and failure. These enclosures can be found in a number of different locales, and this chapter examines their different characteristics.

In the proposed final chapter of the unfinished Pictures and Conversations, Elizabeth Bowen intended to answer the question of whether there ‘is anything uncanny involved in the process of writing?’ For the many writers who appear in her fiction, writing certainly is an uncanny process, capable of mirroring the self and manipulating others. Markie, in To the North, writes on scraps of paper to enact his predatory aims; in The Death of Heart, St Quentin accuses Portia of using her diary to ‘precipitate things’. As Bowen puts the matter, for ‘the writer, writing is eventful; one might say it is in itself eventfulness’. While such uncanny eventfulness would seem to grant the writer an immense power, writing in Bowen’s novels – be it letters, diaries, or novels – often takes on a troubling life of its own. Markie and Portia eventually find themselves thwarted by the after-effects of their writing. Given the tendency of writing to dangerously stray, it is little wonder that so many of Bowen’s writers, such as Iseult Arble in Eva Trout, never complete their masterpieces.

This essay accounts for the pervasive presence of technology in Elizabeth Bowen’s life and writing, arguing that her work develops a nuanced, often ambivalent engagement with technological modernity. From her first novel, The Hotel, to the late and idiosyncratic Eva Trout, Bowen presents technology not merely as a backdrop but as a dynamic force shaping identity, social interaction, and temporal awareness. The chapter traces how Bowen’s characters interact with technological objects – including cars, telephones, radios, and computers – not only as tools but as extensions of the self and mediators of experience. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott’s theory of transitional objects, it demonstrates how Bowen’s characters use technology to navigate psychological development and social belonging. This culminates in a reading of Eva Trout, in which technology becomes a totalising force, anticipating postmodern concerns with cyborg identity and media saturation, and positioning Bowen as a prescient analyst of the evolving relationship between humans and machines.

At the turn of the twentieth century, agriculture in the Gulf was characterised by pastoralism, oasis horticulture, and irrigation systems. As a result of the emergence of the region’s nation states and the oil economy, these activities underwent decline and were replaced by forms of agribusiness and large-scale agriculture. The most conspicuous result of this was the establishment of large enclosures in which members of the ruling class were allocated large areas of land and water resources. The scale of these projects was vast and ambitious. This frontier provided an opportunity for enormous enrichment, but it also led to the exhaustion of non-renewable water reserves. As a result, domestic production was scaled down by the 2000s, leading to an impetus for a greater emphasis on external imports.

Neruda’s poetry and political activism have been naturally inscribed in the geopolitical and hermeneutical framework of the Cold War, the struggle between capitalism and communism, and the national liberation processes of the Global South. His international recognition coincides with his political radicalization: from his exile at the end of 1940 to his presidential candidacy in 1969, promoted by the Communist Party of Chile. His poetry, on the other hand, from Residencia en la tierra and El canto general, and to his later Incitación al Nixonicidio y alabanza de la Revolución Cubana, can be understood as an expression of partisan literature. It is clear that Neruda is not only a well-known writer, but also an important witness of the twentieth century. In this context, this chapter begins with the question: Is a new reading of Neruda possible, a reading beyond the historical framework that has informed his usual reception?

The Veglia prima, ..seconda, and ..terza degli Unisoni (Venice, 1638) describe three meetings of the Academia degli Unisoni founded and hosted in 1637/8 by Giulio Strozzi (1583–1652). They reveal details of Barbara Strozzi’s public role as composer and performer, and the defend the Strozzis and Unisoni from anonymous libel and slander, compiled in the manuscript Satire et altre raccolte per l’Accademia de gli Unisoni in casa di Giulio Strozzi (Marciana, It X, Codice 115 (=7193)) [Satires and other collected works regarding the Academy of the Unisoni in the home of Giulio Strozzi]. This essay clarifies the chronology and relationship between these two bodies of writing discussed by Ellen Rosand. I identify the Academico Spensierato as the author of the three letters that conclude the Satire: the letter from the Spensierato to Giulio Strozzi, and the two letters following that ventriloquize Giulio and Barbara Strozzi.

Chapter 5 looks at political communities in the making and historicises the notion of citizenship status during and after colonialism. In Ghana, citizenship criteria have evolved from a combination of jus soli and jus sanguinis principles to a purely jus sanguinis principle, as if to compensate for the porous nature of Ghana’s borders. This evolution shows a tendency to render citizenship more exclusionary, and more dependent on filiation and indigeneity, creating other boundaries within the nation. Yet the unsystematic and deficient systems of documentation prior and after independence cannot provide proof of one’s status with certainty. This is why new nations (such as Ghana) and local communities end up using the principle of indigeneity to prove their legitimacy to belong. This chapter suggests that indigeneity and citizenship constitute each other and that those who belong are those who can convince of the indigeneity of their ancestors. These narratives of indigeneity being prone to contestation, citizenship is at the same time at risk of being undermined. This implies that local belonging and citizenship can easily be conflated.

The Introduction outlines the essential premises behind this book and the structure the book will take. It also offers some thoughts on the book’s approach to periodisation.

This introductory chapter examines the life, oeuvre, and contested legacy of Pablo Neruda against the backdrop of contemporary debates about cultural memory, ethics, and artistic value. Beginning with recent episodes of public denunciation in Chile, it situates Neruda within a broader dilemma: how to read and evaluate the work of canonical authors whose biographies reveal profound moral failures. The introduction traces Neruda’s evolution as a poet, diplomat, and political actor, highlighting the breadth of his literary production, from love poetry and avant-garde experimentation to epic, politically engaged verse and elemental odes. Rather than offering hagiography or cancellation, it argues for a contextualized reading that recognizes both the gravity of Neruda’s transgressions and the enduring influence of his work on world literature, politics, and cultural imagination. It frames the volume as a collective effort to read Neruda critically, historically, and globally.