This chapter deals with the narrative treatment of time in Alejo Carpentier’s “Historia de lunas,” “Oficio de tinieblas,” “Viaje a la semilla,” “Semejante a la noche” and El acoso. These fictions were marked by an epochal climate in which a sense of civilizational crisis prevailed, as can be seen in the proposals of Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee or Mircea Eliade, thinkers who left their mark on Carpentier’s historical thinking. The analyses of these narratives focus on the way in which their author deploys competing temporalities, a feature that shows how the historical dimension of his narrative was not limited to the recreation of past scenarios. Furthermore, in these works it is possible to trace a theory of historical becoming, a reflection on the teleology of its processes and the meaning of its occurrence.

This chapter investigates the growth of medieval literary traditions descended from Aesop’s fables, which differed from their Late Antique predecessors in that they increased the proportion of non-human characters featured in their collections and amplified the prominence of non-human speech in the texts themselves. It argues that these developments contributed to a shift in the relationship between truth and fable, which had traditionally been antithetical: A “fable” was a synonym for a lie, since fables imagined scenes of beastly speech that could not happen in reality; to arrive at useful knowledge, readers were enjoined to ignore all the non-human chattering and focus on the morals. In these new literary works, the source of knowledge shifted to a point within the very field of non-human speech, with the speaking beast becoming a detour by which the most convoluted paradoxes of species identity could be explored in words.

Classical linguistics and racecraft have an intertwined history, in that Indo-European linguistics arose concurrently with scientific racism, and shares many of the same metaphors and conceptual frameworks. This chapter touches on this shared history, before exploring some aspects of the metalinguistics and sociolinguistics of race in the ancient world. In particular, the concept of ‘linguistic racism’ will be used to look at how ancient texts use lack of (shared) language to imply a lack of humanity, and how non-Greek speakers are compared to animals. It will also look at depictions of foreign-language speakers as the linguistic ‘other’, particularly in depictions of enslaved people.

In this chapter, the ties between the nation, racial identity, and the role of classicism are traced as an identity marker. Alt-right – or identitarian – movements and the nation are coterminous in their racialization, an association that their redeployment of antiquity reifies. Analysis of the nation, Whiteness, and antiquity draws examples from the West, particularly the United States, in terms of the wayward identitarian movements that have been proliferating. Although the nation controls the apparatus of the state, identitarian movements benefit from new means of communication, namely, the Internet, and social media. I imagine a way out of the paradox of identitarianism through alternative uses of classicism. This way out is also an end of nation, as opposed to Fukuyama’s end of history, which depends on the strength of nations and states.

This chapter explores the many ways Mexico became central in Ginsberg’s poetic evolution. Inspired by the example of his mentor, William S. Burroughs, Ginsberg visited several archaeological sites in Mexico such as Palenque, which inspired one of his most successful early poems, “Siesta in Xbalba.” Ginsberg traveled widely throughout the country and continued the mystical quest which began with his experience of “cosmic consciousness” in Harlem in 1948 as he read the poetry of William Blake. In poems such as “Paterson,” Ginsberg wrote that he “would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping/in my veins,/eyes and ears full of marijuana, /eating the god Peyote…” than endure his life in America. Ginsberg read widely in the history of culture of Mexico, and his poems as well as his journals reveal the profound effect Mexico would have on his life and work.

Chapter 2.5 sets out how long term care is provided and how it is paid for. Long-term care (LTC) refers to a broad package of personal, social and medical services provided over extended periods of time which may be delivered by care professionals or by informal care givers. Key learning includes that

• Population ageing, particularly in advanced economies, creates growing demands for LTC.

• There are inequities in the need for and access to LTC. Older people, women, those with lower incomes and lower levels of education are all more likely to need care, but less likely to have access to it.

• Funding arrangements for LTC are problematic in many countries

• – Voluntary insurance and out of pocket payments commonly fill public coverage gaps but create inequities.

• – Asset-tests for eligibility for publicly funded care are essentially regressive wealth taxes due to the unequal distribution of LTC needs.

• – Encouraging for-profit provision theoretically fosters competition, availability and responsiveness but the pressures to generate profits can jeopardize quality and safety.

• Countries face urgent pressures on LTC and could usefully consider

• – Increasing public expenditure and broadening the funding mix for LTC

• – Better, fairer pooling of resources across generations

• – Revenue sources independent of payroll contributions since labour markets as a revenue base will shrink at the same time that demand for ageing-related LTC increases

• – Better data and indicators to assess access, quality, and value for money

• – Patient-centred and coordinated approaches to LTC.

Corinth is often associated with the emergence of Greek monumental architecture. The long absence of worked stone in post-Mycenaean architecture cannot be explained by the loss of the necessary tools and techniques. Worked stone slabs were used in pit and cist graves in the northeastern Peloponnese from the Mycenaean through the Geometric periods, and large monolithic sarcophagi appeared at Corinth ca. 900 BCE. Such burials, sometimes containing valuable grave goods, apparently belonged to high-status individuals. By contrast, until the early seventh century BCE at Corinth and elsewhere, buildings had fieldstone foundations, mudbrick walls, and thatched roofs; isolated worked stones occurred rarely, e.g., as beddings for wooden thresholds. In the second half of the eighth century, grave goods disappeared from Corinthian burials, and the elite displayed their status with rich dedications in sanctuaries. During these years, Corinth became increasingly wealthy, first under the oligarchic Bacchiads and later in the tyranny of Kypselos. The first Greek temples with single-skin walls of cuboid stone blocks and roofs of terracotta tiles, built ca. 680–650 at Corinth and Isthmia, represent elite dedications. As with the worked stone in elite Corinthian burials, the quarried stone blocks used in these temples enhanced their display of wealth.

Overshadowed by other international journeys, Ginsberg’s six months traveling alone through South America in 1960 have been relatively neglected by biographers and critics. However, recent editions and new research enable a better understanding of the literary and political significance of his geographic and drug trips in the region. The long-delayed publication of his South American Journals in 2019 reveals how prescient Ginsberg was to see the visionary value of ayahuasca (aka yagé), the indigenous psychedelic, set against the policing of reality by a materialistic world. His journals also show the full extent of his spiritual crisis in South America and his difficulties in finding a poetic form to express his experiences. Although The Yage Letters has been neglected by Ginsberg scholars, the complex backstory of the book of South American trips he coauthored with William S. Burroughs reveals a much greater role in its creation.

The collectivization of one profession, hairstyling, is the focus of this chapter. Barbershops, with bathhouses and photographers, were considered an essential service for city residents and were therefore part of those benefits that had to be provided under the commune umbrella. Yet during the Great Leap not only did hairstyling fashions and a correspondent hierarchy of hairdressers persisted, but they were recognized and actively fostered by local and state authorities. The case of hairdressers and barbers in Great Leap Beijing thus shows not only the attentiveness some cadres paid to the minute aspects of the quotidian but also the resilience of subtle (and not so subtle) social differences in the midst of what was supposed to be one of the “egalitarian” moments in the Maoist era.

Allen Ginsberg read, reread, and approached the work of Walt Whitman throughout his life. How should we understand the overtly acknowledged relationship between these two poets? This chapter suggests that at the same time as one can trace the references Ginsberg makes to Whitman in his poems, compare and contrast the focus of each, or consider the parallels between the poetics of the two, we can also understand (the sometimes unsavory) Whitman in the (sometimes unsavory) Ginsberg canon as a screen onto which Ginsberg projected his ideas of his own literary ethos and significance.

This chapter deals with Allen Ginsberg's enormous personal archive. It includes the history of how the archive was created, what the contents of the archive are, and how it came to be located in the Special Collections Department of Stanford University's library. It details some of the many uses of the archive today and in the future.

The jiao (brokerage cartel) was a merchant organisation constituted by sea merchants who spoke Fujianese dialects or other related vernaculars. In the middle of the eighteenth century, it was first established in Taiwan Fucheng (Tainan), and then its activities gradually expanded: north to Japan and south to Siam (Thailand) and Myanmar.1 The members of a jiao were called jiao merchants. Most of them ran businesses in important port cities. The small ones opened ‘ninety-eight firms’ (jiuba hang 九八行); this type of firm accepted commissioned sales and took a 2 per cent commission. The large ones owned ships and became ‘bow firms’ (chuantou hang 船頭行). They were mainly engaged in import and export trade.2

How does Asia feature in the history of international law? Very sparingly, according to multiple reviews of the Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law.1 Published in 2012, the Oxford Handbook was set up as a project to break new ground by ‘departing from the “well-worn paths” of how the history of international law has been written so far’.2 The aims included challenging the Eurocentricism of international legal history, and bringing within the frame things generally excluded from it – such as the ‘many other experiences and forms of legal relations between autonomous [extra-European] communities developed in the course of history’, including those ‘which were discontinued as a result of domination and colonization by European Powers’.3 Proceeding from this promising beginning, the Handbook included specific chapters on ‘China’, ‘Japan’ and ‘India’, as well as chapters on the ‘encounters’ with Europe of each.4 Without doubt, these proved to be interesting and revealing outings. Not least, they underlined how much remained to be studied and written of the very polities that European scholars from Mill to Hegel had declared to have ‘no history’ (to the productive irritation of generations of historians from these polities).5 Yet, as the reviews that followed publication of the Handbook perceptively noted, having had the run of six chapters in the sixty-six-chapter volume (about a dozen chapters across all non-European regions), these polities did not infiltrate other parts of the volume. That is, they did not leave the ‘regional’ section of the volume. Barring exceptions, the Handbook chapters on key international legal actors and themes did not draw upon non-European engagements, debates, concepts, practices or sources.6 Of ‘the 21 individuals presented in portrait, 19 [were] white European men’ (and one a white European woman).7 While Christianity was ‘all over’ the chapters, Islamic international law had ‘only a compartmentalized, isolated role … presented as largely ahistorical and static’.8 Encounters were had with Europe, but Asian polities did not meet each other, nor other non-European polities.9 The footnotes, tables of treaties and cases, and bibliographies also told a largely European story.10 And all this was perhaps unavoidable, explained one reviewer, given that volume had not opened up the logically prior question of what to look at, in identifying the history of international law.11 It had not distanced itself from the ‘discipline’s orthodox approach to sources’, which ‘direct[ed] scholars of “pre-modern” international law towards the writings of the “fathers of international law” [all European men], and … scholars of international law’s “modern” history to state consent’.12 These sources were European: they represented particular European innovations, responding to particular European experiences. Yet they were cast into universal categories into which non-Europeans did not fit – or rarely fit. Seen through the prism of these sources, non-Europeans, having few representatives either in the pantheon of fathers or in the club of possible consent givers, did not qualify as contributors to the history of international law. Clearly, then, some recalibration of what it meant to do the history of international law was needed. Only by engaging the question of ‘the history of what’, as Anne Orford has put it,13 could we begin to build a history of international law that engages with ‘extra-European experiences and forms’, as the Handbook had set out to do.

This chapter explores the legacies of indenture for international law in Asia through a survey of the existing scholarship and points to new directions for research. Focusing on indentured labor from India, which comprised the majority of labourers recruited under this system in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, it shows how indenture shifted definitions of emigrants and foreigners, shaped discourses on welfare in migration, and left its mark on international relations as they emerged in the aftermath of the two world wars. The chapter also discusses how questions of nationality and citizenship in the postcolonial period often overlooked the plight of the descendents of indenture in Asia, and concludes with speculations on what the new form of indenture is and the limits of drawing these historical analogies.