Until today, not only the general public but also scholars of colonialism and imperialism debate about the extent to which Europeans were aware of the centrality of racial discrimination for colonialism and empires. Those who stress that racism was the foundation of European colonialism appear to be anachronistic. However, as this essay demonstrates, at least the British of the late nineteenth century were well-aware of the constitutive character of racial discrimination for their Empire. During the “constitutional panic” which the proposal of the Ilbert Bill in 1883 caused, the arguments exchanged in newspapers, town hall meetings and parliamentary debates revealed the racist foundation of British India. One contemporary observed “the unhappy tendency of this controversy to bring into broad daylight everything which a wise and prudent administrator should seek to hide.” This essay seeks to bring into broad daylight once again what has been widely forgotten or ignored. Statements in Parliament expressing that it was “perfectly impossible and ridiculous, so long as we retained our hold on India, to give Native races full equality” testify for explicitness of the debate. Analyzing the arguments against the Ilbert Bill, which sought to introduce full racial equality in the judiciary, serves for better understanding the foundation of British India.

The independence of Brazil (1822) resulted in its separation from Portugal and its birth as an independent empire. It is important to understand the role of people of colour in this movement for independence. Focusing on Ceará, the main argument of this article is that people of colour, both free and enslaved, played an active and significant role in Brazilian independence, as they fought for freedom, for established rights, and for greater involvement in public affairs. They accomplished this amidst social upheaval, political instability and the rise of local authoritarian leadership resulting from the collapse of the old colonial order. As a study in subaltern agency, the contributions of this article go even further, as the consulted primary source material depicts the vital role of Ceará in the absorption of Brazil's northern regions into the new empire – an understudied topic in its own right.

This article explores the cultural commemorations of J. Robert Oppenheimer through the lenses of opera and film, specifically focusing on Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer (2023) and Peter Sellars and John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic (2005/2018). It engages with Michel-Rolph Trouillot's theories on history and mythmaking to analyze how these cultural productions function as acts of commemoration that sanitize and mythicize historical processes. The revival of Oppenheimer as a mythic figure reflects a broader societal negotiation with the legacy of nuclear technology and its implications in the twenty-first century. Both the opera and the film reify a political and ideological attachment to the U.S. nuclear complex. Furthermore, this article critically examines the production settings of “Doctor Atomic” at the Santa Fe Opera and Nolan's on-location filming in New Mexico. It argues that these settings add a ritualistic valence to the narrative, enhancing the mythic portrayal of Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. Through a detailed analysis of narrative strategies and media affordances, this study reveals how contemporary depictions of historical figures and events shape and sustain national myths that support an ongoing attachment to the nuclear complex.

This article examines the significance of a highly unusual stone statue discovered at Teynham, Kent, depicting a triton and a ketos. It discusses the context of the find in what appears to be a mausoleum complex adjacent to Watling Street. It provides a detailed description of the statue itself, alongside a petrological study, and places this in the context of other depictions of marine deities, particularly of tritons, in Britain and beyond. The article considers how the sculpture might have been placed on the exterior or interior of the tomb. It also discusses the possible occupant of the mausoleum (perhaps a villa owner or sailor), taking into account the possible symbolic value of the triton, either as signifier of afterlife beliefs or biographical achievement, as well as the ritual treatment of the statue after the tomb was dismantled. The wider context of the Teynham mausoleum is then analysed in terms of its location and form in relation to comparable monuments found in south-east England and better preserved tombs on the continent.

If the current state of publishing is anything to go by, the classical music industry and music academia are in a state of crisis. This will come as little surprise to anyone either teaching, researching, or studying music, or existing in the professional world of musical performance. The mushrooming of edited volumes, journal articles, and think-pieces such as op-eds and podcasts, all offering perspectives on variations of classical music’s ‘challenges’ and ‘futures’ is notable, and has only accelerated in recent years. More important than this quantity, however, is the sheer diversity of opinions, revealing how widely the ideological fissures across all corners of academic music studies and the classical music industry have deepened. Fraught debates have spilled over from the relatively insular bubbles of social media discourse and academic publications into national headlines.

‘Nations,’ political geographer Jim MacLaughlin tells us, ‘literally have to be built from the ground up.’ During the Irish Revolution, republicans engaged in the construction of a counter-state which included the sporadic application of alternative policing arrangements and a judiciary in the form of Dáil courts, as well as a representative assembly that was driven underground for much of the War of Independence. However, several recent and highly original works of scholarship underline once again that the revolutionary period was as much about destroying British state apparatus and perceived symbols of colonialism as it was about creating a new nation-state. This thread of destruction has been explored from a micro-level (the burning of a village) to a national level (the burning of roughly 300 country houses). Justin Dolan Stover's highly anticipated Enduring ruin examines environmental destruction between 1916 and 1923 utilising a broad definition of environment that incorporates man-made structures, and their destruction, alongside rural landscapes. Stover's palpable rendering of the Easter Rising, for example, contends that ‘artillery bombardment, machine-gun fire, ensuing fires, looting, the collapse of asbestos-lined tenements, human and animal casualties, and odours indicative of unattended death grounded the rebellion's ruinous scope’ (p. 8). Enduring ruin innovatively elucidates the impact of this unique ‘sensory stamp’ on combatants and civilians while chronicling how propagandists utilised the imagery and language of the Great War to cultivate a sense of victimhood and elicit international sympathy (pp 12–13, 112–18). Other chapters examine the impact of less overtly political environmental damage and the impact of reprisals by crown forces. Like Donlon and Dooley's monographs, Stover tactfully considers the interaction between landscape and people throughout, drawing attention to the important area of the revolutionary period's impact on the mental health of combatants and civilians (pp 74, 92–7). This work adds a highly original perspective by presenting the impact of tree felling, road trenching and incendiarism, contrasting the ‘romanticism’ of sawing trees ‘by hand under the cover of darkness’ with ‘the disillusionment of the mechanised evisceration of nature experienced along the Western Front’ (p. 61). Alongside using weather reports to illustrate how ‘extreme weather did not stymy guerrilla activity’, the author also employs a sample of 2,183 incidents of ‘landscape manipulation and ensuing damage to the built and natural environment’ which, like the burning of big houses, correlates to the more violent areas of the country (pp 70–73).

The last decade has been a fruitful period for the archaeology of Euboea. New and ongoing work includes research projects, survey, rescue, and systematic excavations, led by the Ephorate of Antiquities of Euboea of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture (henceforth EAE) and the foreign schools active on the island. In the northern part of the island, protection and restoration of monuments and collections has been the focus of work in various towns (Oreoi, Histiaea, Limni, Aedipsos), and a few sites have been explored (Kerinthos, Cape Artemision). In central Euboea, construction works have allowed for further insights on ancient settlements (Aliveri, Chalkida, Manika, Psachna–Kastella), while systematic excavation projects have explored sites and cultic activities from the Bronze Age to the Archaic time (Amarynthos, Lefkandi–Xeropolis), as well as athletic institutions of the Classical to Roman periods (Eretria). The ancient map of the southern part of Euboea has been enriched (Kapsouri Kaphirea and in the Bouros-Kastri, Kampos, and Katsaronio plains) during multiple survey explorations, leading to further systematic excavations (Gourimadi, Plakari), while extensive research has also now begun in the ancient quarries and the drakospita. New publications on previously investigated sites (Gkisouri, Zarakes, Karystos) and on underwater explorations completes the picture.

This article explores the dialectics of hope and anger as responses to what Lear (2006) called ‘devastation’, the colonial-capitalist destruction of the ontological groundings of life. Lear argues that ‘radical hope’ allows for ‘survival’ in such contexts, and his work has been influential. Yet, I want to be careful with relying on hope as a political affect. Hope is also a sociality-sanctioned emotion. Anger, by contrast, remains frowned upon and discouraged. However, anger can have liberatory potential: it constitutes a communicative act, articulating the urgent need for political change. I explore the semiotics of anger by considering the complex affective contours of a musical performance, ‘Protest’, created by Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach (1960). The expression of anger is reflexive and performative. It is a recognizable register as well as a politically passionate communicative act that resists its own foreclosure and that intersects with hope in complex ways. (Hope, anger, affect, music, negative dialectics, philosophical sociolinguistics)*

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.