The Foxes of Harrow by Frank Yerby, as well as Knock on Any Door by Willard Motley, were widely read novels adapted into films in the 1940s. The tendency among some scholars to not fully acknowledge that The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door explore the negative consequences of discrimination upon African Americans may be because both novels focus on protagonists who are not Black characters. Through the depiction of relationships between white and Black characters, Yerby and Motley subversively highlight ironic historical inequitable treatment of African Americans within a democracy. Film versions of The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door feature less content about civil rights due to concerns that post–World War II attitudes about race would affect profits. This examination contends that Frank Yerby and Willard Motley in The Foxes of Harrow and Knock on Any Door strongly advocated for civil rights within African American literature.

This chapter draws from research the author has undertaken into the politically charged circumstances of life and death in situations of state violence in France in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the Algerian war of independence. It reflects on the author’s engagements with the morgue record book of the Institut médico-légal (IML) in Paris for the year 1961, which is stored in the archives of the Prefecture of the Paris police. This ledger includes entries on corpses received at the morgue. Through the fall of 1961, there were a number of entries for corpses received at the IML in which no identifying name was listed. Instead, persons were listed with the title “inconnu” – “unknown,” “unidentified,” unrecognized.” With many of these entries, small photographs were affixed to the sides of the pages. In reflecting on the presence of these photographs of the unidentified dead, the author delves into the complicated play of death and life, and actuality and imagining, that marks the unsettling appearance of these photographs. The haunting aftereffects of the photographs tie into questions of image, memory, body and corpse, the phenomenon of death life, and representations of violence in histories of French colonialism.

From the beginning of Manin’s conjecture, higher dimensional algebraic geometry plays important roles in its foundational aspects. This is already evident in early papers in this field, for example, [BT98b], [Tsc03], and it has been more systematically used in recent papers [HTT15], [LTT18], [HJ17], [LT17], [LT19a], [Sen21], [LST22], and [LT19b]. Indeed, the key inputs in the latter are the developments of higher dimensional algebraic geometry in the last decade, that is, the minimal model program [BCHM10] and the boundedness of singular Fano varieties (BAB conjecture) [Bir19] and [Bir21]. In this chapter, we review the necessary notions and results from higher dimensional algebraic geometry and the minimal model program.

In this chapter we compute our conjectural exceptional sets constructed in Section 4.3.2 for several examples. Since the uniform bounds in Corollary 3.5.6 are not effective in general, our general proofs of Theorem 4.3.5 do not provide effective algorithms to compute these exceptional sets. Instead, we appeal to adjunction theory, which provides us with powerful and practical tools to compute them.

This chapter departs from many typical readings of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which treat that novel’s spiritual and numinous presences, practices, and powers as fantastical or magical rather than real and efficacious. Drawing on Díaz’s own statements, I show how the novel insists on the reality of supernatural forces and on how practices of prayer and the intervention of powerful spiritual forces, such as the Mongoose, can lead to resilience and survival amid the uncertainties and traumas of Caribbean dictatorship and migration to America. Díaz’s sense of cosmic vision in the novel, an insistence that there is spiritual purpose and power at work in the cosmos, shows how syncretic religious formations in the Caribbean can empower a radical hope in the face of the seemingly traumatic and impossible.

Chapter 6 studies the effects of state support on firm internationalization. Based on an original dataset of the history of the foreign production and innovation investments of large Brazilian MNCs, it compares the internationalization trajectories of supported and non-supported MNCs before and after state support is introduced. Using a difference-in-differences design, it provides evidence of the effectiveness of state support for MNCs: Supported firms outpace non-supported firms both in access to markets (measured by number of host countries and access to free trade agreements) and knowledge (measured by the innovation ecosystems of the host countries and whether they establish a research and development center abroad). It further probes the mechanisms underlying this effect, relying on in-depth interviews with firm managers of supported firms and bank bureaucrats, the chapter shows that BNDES’ relational banking approach can explain why BNDES support generates positive results despite evidence of political considerations in allocation decisions.

This chapter identifies in George Saunders’s earlier critiques of neoliberalism in his short stories and his critique of a conservative American version of Christian hell in his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, a common project with a spiritual alternative in the Buddhist order of compassion. I offer a brief history of the Christian theology of hell and American neoliberalism to show how they share a common idea of a punitive, individualistic sense of natural order, one with a common origin point in the theology of Augustine on the divine will. First tracing the public spiritual commitments expressed by Saunders across a wide range of his interviews, I then show how his sense of the potential of literature to empower a spirituality of compassion informs Lincoln in the Bardo’s rejection of the Christian hell and the novel’s alternative vision of a world where compassion is the order of the universe.

This chapter draws on Margaret Atwood’s interviews and archives to show how she is concerned to explore in her late fiction and poetry the idea of the soul as “the better story” about human and nonhuman animal life. I show how Atwood critiques not only Christian Nationalism but also, in Oryx and Crake, a materialist understanding of life. As a response to each of these extremes, Atwood turns to the soul, particularly in The Testaments and in Dearly, showing how that idea and the experienced presence of the souls of the dead can motivate endurance and hope in the face of oppressive formations of Christianity and a materialist sense of nothingness after death. Drawing on Atwood’s drafts of The Testaments, I trace how the novel became more spiritually serious as it developed and how the spiritual poetry of Dearly works together with scenes of spiritual support in Atwood’s novel.

“Travelers (1936–1971)” offers the first comprehensive account of Argentine visits to the Falkland/Malvinas Islands between 1936 and 1971, a period in which such journeys were rare and logistically complex. Drawing on a wide range of travel chronicles – books, articles, interviews, films, and lectures – it reconstructs how Argentine visitors represented the islanders and their way of life to mainland audiences. These first-person accounts shaped what Argentines knew, or believed they knew, about a largely unfamiliar population at a time when interest in the “Malvinas issue” was steadily growing. The chapter examines the motivations behind these trips, the backgrounds of the travelers, and the narratives they produced, revealing a spectrum of perspectives often marked by nationalist assumptions. Despite their differences, the chronicles generally sought to humanize and explain a distant community, filling an information gap left by school curricula and press coverage. Some gained national visibility and entered public debate, influencing how generations of Argentines imagined the islanders – their origins, loyalties, and aspirations. By critically examining these sources, the chapter shows how Argentine representations of the Falklands community were shaped as much by direct observation as by excpectation and belief.

The riddle of Black internationalism applied in a 1940s context is that the phrase can have a double or veiled meaning: totalitarian or liberationist. If Black internationalism of the 1940s presumes African, American Negro, or Black nationalism and a resurgent race and color consciousness from the 1930s, insights into solving the riddle come through the work and texts of poets of the people. This theme of people is epitomized in Walker’s “For My People.” But other poets reflected a common interest among peoples across the Black diaspora: the struggle against injustice by the oppressed against the oppressor. Reorienting reality to people as the soul of a nation in the belly of Western civilization derives not only from the vernacular, folk speech and Negro dialect, but also the common language of people: demotic. Hence, people’s poets create poetic forms of people and a poetics inscribing demotic rhythms of people.

It is a staple of traditional ethical theories that they contain an injunction against causing harm. Indeed, many people hold this to be the most basic principle of morality – “First do no harm”. However, what about harms caused by the market? In this book we are interested in developing the thought that the market is different in the sense that there is room for moral leeway because of the social benefits that markets bring in their wake. In this chapter, we explore the limits of that claim; exactly how different is the market? One important way of doing so is by thinking about the harm caused by markets and the moral significance of that harm. What should we make of market harms? Beyond the most egregious kinds of harms, and conditional upon the establishment and maintenance of various ameliorative practices to soften their negative effects, we argue that society ought to accommodate and accept a large range of harmful behaviours that we wouldn’t normally accept in many other spheres of society.

“Islanders (1960–1971)” situates the Falklands within the broader global context of decolonization, a process that profoundly reshaped the British Empire after World War II, particularly following the Suez Crisis. By the 1960s, Britain could no longer excercise authority as it once had, a shift that directly affected its policies toward the Islands. The chapter examines how islanders experienced three converging challenges during this decade: economic instability, political uncertainty, and the prospect of integration with Argentina. It argues that these pressures marked a pivotal moment in the islanders’ perception of their future, generating a growing sense of vulnerability. Economically, the decline in wool prices cast doubt on the long-term viability of the Islands’ main industry. Politically, the United Nations’ recognition of a sovereignty dispute between the United Kingdom and Argentina forced a reassessment of British policy, confronting islanders with an unfamiliar and unsettling diplomatic landscape. The chapter also revisits episodes such as the unauthorized landings by Argentine civilians, usually examined from the Argentine perspective but here analyzed through islanders’ experiences. Finally, it explores islanders’ views of Argentina and its people, revealing perceptions shaped by distance, anxiety, and often limited, distorted information.

This chapter explores how the Black cooperative movement unsettles critical narratives that describe the 1940s as an era of political retreat. Engaging George Schuyler, W. E. B. DuBois, Ann Petry, Margaret Walker, and Richard Wright, among others, across a range of literary texts (newspapers, pamphlets, popular fiction, poetry, essays, and the diary), this chapter argues that Black cooperatives were not zones of mere survival, but catalysts for a vernacular poetics of refusal and elusion. Illuminating vexing interludes in the careers of both canonical and almost forgotten figures, it excavates an aesthetics of evasion, one that critiqued and bypassed surveillance activities orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover. This aesthetics of evasion revises our understanding not only of the Black literary imagination of the 1940s, but also of Black radicalism itself. Offering a new perspective on black cooperative life and the authors that helped to craft it, this chapter ultimately calls us to rethink the relationship among charismatic leadership, conspicuous protest, and social movements at large.