Pietro Metastasio’s opera Catone in Utica (Rome, 1727) represents ancient Roman imperial politics through the recurring trope of ‘enslavement’. Reading Catone alongside Metastasio’s sources, from Lucan to Addison, reveals how the poet’s de-particularizing representational code converted historical modes of racialization into a generalizing Cartesian moral framework, and thereby demonstrates how the continuing influence of post-Enlightenment constructs of biological race has obscured the multiplicity of racialisms in earlier contexts. Turning from a physiological episteme to an earlier, ‘unassimilated space’ limned by poetics, sentimentality, and song, this article takes Metastasian opera seria as a window onto historically contingent conceptions of racialized difference.

In this paper, we give an explicit formula as well as a practical algorithm for computing the Cassels–Tate pairing on $\text{Sel}^{2}(J) \times \text{Sel}^{2}(J)$ where J is the Jacobian variety of a genus two curve under the assumption that all points in J[2] are K-rational. We also give an explicit formula for the Obstruction map $\text{Ob}: H^1(G_K, J[2]) \rightarrow \text{Br}(K)$ under the same assumption. Finally, we include a worked example demonstrating that we can improve the rank bound given by a 2-descent via computing the Cassels–Tate pairing.

This column was born out of curiosity and community. Inspired by the many conversations and shared experiences of colleagues and friends at gatherings of the International Association of Law Libraries (IALL) and other law library organizations around the world, it seeks to explore the ever-evolving roles we play in the legal community.

This article works to recover the life story of Qudsiyya Khurshid, a once well-known Mandate Palestinian intellectual and educator, who wrote essays for publication and for broadcasting on the Palestine Broadcasting Service, while working as a principal at girls’ schools in al-Bireh and Jerusalem. One of a number of educated women active in the Mandate public sphere, she disappeared from public consciousness after the Nakba. But in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, where she had moved with her husband, a naturalized U.S. citizen, she became a prominent figure in civic work and as a community speaker on Palestinian and Middle Eastern life and culture. Recovering her full life story makes it possible to better appreciate the opportunities available for Palestinian women during the Mandate period and to similarly appreciate the efforts and impact of early Palestine activism among displaced Palestinians in the United States.

This article examines the activities of the Japanese Buddhist priest Ueda Tenzui (1899–1974) in wartime Thailand and Burma. Ueda initially went to Southeast Asia to pursue his studies of Buddhist precepts. During the war, he joined a pacification team of the Japanese military in occupied Burma and, as part of this role, became the headteacher of a Japanese language school. He was later ordained and served for some time as a monk in the Burmese Theravada tradition. Since the 1970s, research on Japanese Buddhist involvement in Japan’s wars has focused on criticizing those who cooperated with the war effort and praising those who resisted. In this regard, Ueda is unquestionably a ‘collaborator’. Yet, his case demonstrates the importance of the concept of the ‘grey zone’ between the two extremes of collaboration and resistance. While we have to acknowledge that Ueda acted in support of the war effort at the request of the military, he was also a scholar and a practitioner who deepened his understanding of Theravada Buddhism through personal experience. Ueda criticized the war after Japan’s defeat and also came to actively appreciate Burmese Buddhism’s strict adherence to the precepts. At the same time, he never showed a critical attitude towards Japanese Buddhism. Ueda’s thinking is characterized by his ability to find commonalities between Burmese and Japanese Buddhism without ranking them according to some hierarchy of superiority and inferiority, while also recognizing the differences that exist between these two branches of Buddhism.

This article takes a novel approach to fragmentary Roman comic playwright Caecilius Statius by exploring the titles attested for his comedies. Informed by Genette's theory on the title qua paratext, it argues that titles are distinct artifacts of Caecilius’ dramatic production designed to circulate without the texts they label and, consequently, it treats them as legitimate objects of interpretation in and of themselves. Analysis of ten titles in both Greek and Latin reveals that Caecilius Statius’ titles are polysemous, bilingual and profoundly meaningful in their engagement with the genre of New Comedy and with translation as a social and cultural phenomenon of middle republican Rome. But given that the titles of Roman comedy are largely uninvestigated by scholarship, this piece begins by arguing for their author-ity, setting forth the evidence for comic titles’ origins, function and transmission. In so doing, it demonstrates the palliata's textuality and challenges the communis opinio regarding comic scripts’ passage from stage to page. A Supplementary Appendix available online (10.1017/S0075435824000285) presents the evidence for the titles of Caecilius’ plays.

Since 2015, the south-eastern region of Nigeria has experienced sporadic outbursts of aggression spearheaded by Biafran separatist agitators. However, the latter part of the 2010s has witnessed a marked increase in the fervent endeavours of Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) activists within the same area as they passionately pursue their aspirations for self-determination. Central to their approach is enforcing a compulsory weekly ‘sit-at-home’ policy, effectively establishing a quasi-sovereign enclave within the region. The prevalence of social media has provided a prominent platform for propagating secessionist sentiments. IPOB also advocates vigilante justice against individuals who dare to flout the mandated Monday sit-at-home order. An alarming manifestation of this stance can be gleaned from a tweet containing a chilling threat: ‘[I]f you come out, we will kill you, hang your head, and upload it.’ In response to these developments, the Nigerian state has assumed a resolute stance, taking action to proscribe IPOB and declaring any social gatherings of south-eastern youths a ‘state of exception’. As this article examines IPOB’s sit-at-home directive and the escalating focus on fear and retribution against transgressors in the south-eastern region, it adopts a comprehensive methodology that integrates oral interviews, focus group discussions, analysis of newspaper editorials, books and journal articles, and the tracking of relevant online hashtags for the purpose of data generation and analysis. Adopting securitization theory, this article offers an interpretative lens to comprehend the intricate issues at stake.