Political objects, like national flags, arouse emotions even when they are subliminal stimuli. Through two experiments that show subliminal stimuli to the subjects, this article analyzes if those emotions are positive or negative ones—that is to say, if they enhance an inclusive reaction or an excluding one. Besides, the article compares the intensity of the flag’s emotional effect with that of the emoticons, which are figures intended to represent emotional reactions or states. Findings confirm that the Spanish flag, as a subliminal stimulus, influences the opinions of the participants. However, it has had a lower effect than that obtained in previous, similar experiments. Emoticons produce a much more intense type of response than flags. The experiments (n = 85; n = 126) enlarge the knowledge about the emotional effects of political objects of nonconscious perception. Besides, we present an original methodological contribution: the use of emoticons to alter political views.

The emergence of the Sámi Parliament has lifted Norwegian Sámi politics into an international discourse on indigenous peoples. The clearest imprints of the new Sámi political space are found in the High North region of Norway, where the Sámi account for a significant proportion of the population. The article shows to what extent and how Sámi agency affects governance structures and business development in the north in an increasingly globalised economic setting. From its origin, Sámi agency has influenced development in the High North through three processes: the first is through the Sámi institution building and strengthening of Sámi communities; the second is through its links to local and regional societal development; and the third is through the role of Sámi politics in globalised development processes. One main finding is that the boundaries between these links to the surrounding environment have become more diffuse. Sámi agency is taking a more important role in the economic development processes in the High North, often in terms of the local and regional processes, and now also within the increasingly important globalised economic modernisation processes in which inclusion in new multi-level governance structures is important.

Rejection of immigration has become a major political factor in many countries throughout the world. The notion of nativism can be used to analyze forms of this rejection insofar as it involves promoting the interests and way of life of “natives” at the expanse of migrants. This article adopts a twofold approach to conceptualize the nativist phenomenon in contemporary Russia. First, I consider discursive expressions of nativism as observed among ethnonationalist actors as well as in the rhetoric of the authorities (especially in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine), against a background of widespread xenophobia. This reflection draws on interpretations of the slogan “Russia for the Russians.” Second, I consider popular expressions of nativism, including those linked to ethnic violence. I analyze a series of antimigrant riots since the 2000s based on surveys, analysis of the media, and field data. These riots, often supported by organized nationalist actors, involve claims that can be defined as nativist in that they concern protection of natives (korennye) from “foreigners,” understood in ethnic or racial terms and deemed to be the cause of social ills. Overall, this article contributes to comparative studies of nativism in countries that face mass internal or foreign migration.

In a corpus compiled from the notes in John Walker's pronouncing dictionary (first edition 1791), Trapateau (2016) found that the most frequently occurring evaluative term used was vulgar. In Walker's dictionary, vulgar is defined as ‘plebeian, suiting to the common people, practised among the common people, mean, low, being of the common rate; publick, commonly bruited’ (1791, s.v. vulgar). The frequency of this term in Walker's critical notes suggests that the role of his dictionary was to warn against unacceptable pronunciations as well as to provide an account of acceptable or, to use Walker's second most frequent term, polite ones. In this article, I discuss some of the pronunciations labelled vulgar by Walker and other eighteenth-century authors and argue that, far from dismissing such evidence as prescriptive, we should consider the role played by Walker and his contemporaries in the enregisterment of stigmatised variants and varieties.

During the 1930s, Heitor Villa-Lobos concentrated his efforts on coordinating Brazilian musical education. As such, he changed his compositional style and did not travel to Europe again until 1936. This article examines Villa-Lobos's trip to Europe in 1936, drawing on Florencia Garramuño's call to ‘incorporate avant-garde voyages as founding moments’ for an autochthonous national character in music. During his journey, Villa-Lobos represented Brazil in different settings: as a deputy at the International Congress of Music Education in Prague and as a composer in under-the-radar political negotiations with Nazi Germany in Berlin. Considering the authoritarian Vargas Regime, Brazilian modernism, and the dialectical relation between nationalism and internationalism, I argue that this trip served as a catalyst for a new creative phase, culminating in the series of Bachianas brasileiras, a resignification of J. S. Bach's music and legacy in the context of his interpretation of Brazilian Antropofagia (cultural cannibalism).

In 1925 the Fascist dictatorship forced Gaetano Salvemini to leave Italy and begin a new life in exile. Salvemini understood he could find political and financial support in London to achieve two main aims: to live a decent life as an antifascist exile and fight the Fascist dictatorship from abroad. Thanks to a network encompassing intellectuals, academics, journalists, and politicians, London provided Salvemini with a platform for sharing antifascist stances outside Italy. This essay will develop research on this topic by taking into account Salvemini's conference speeches, articles, books, and essays written while in Britain, from 1925 to 1934. The corpus of the selected texts will show that Salvemini carefully singled out topics that were able to attract the attention of a foreign audience, particularly British public opinion. Therefore, the analysis of Salvemini's intellectual production during this period and the reaction of the press will contribute to cast a new light on his antifascist strategies; in other words, it will lead to a consideration of the extent to which being part of a British intellectual network transformed his approach to the antifascist struggle.

After Ekrem İmamoğlu won as Istanbul’s mayor, the contestation between the city and central government resembled other cases of liberal mayors winning in illiberal populist regimes. To expand liberal democracy, the mayor sought to reinvigorate effective democratic citizenship by increasing access to information, creating more inclusive governance networks through public participation opportunities, limiting the regime’s clientelism and rent-seeking opportunities in real estate and contracting, and (re)creating social solidarity. The national government responded by extensively covering “scandals” and continuing populist rhetoric to maintain polarization, limiting the city’s financial resources, and moving power and projects to agencies they still controlled. This article uses Istanbul to develop this model and illustrate how İmamoğlu has made progress in each area despite the central government’s effort to constrain his administration.

This paper analyzes adjective positioning in French through the lens of language contact. Though some adjectives are nearly always either before their noun (pre-nominal) or after (post-nominal), others – usually adjectives that depict a positive or negative value – can be found in either position without any detectable semantic change. Our aim is to investigate the possible influence of English on the positioning of these adjectives by using a corpus of native French TV media as well as media translated from English. The categorical pre-nominal pattern of English might be causing a higher rate of pre-nominal adjectives to be used in translated media in comparison to native media. Our findings indicate that the translated corpus shows a preference for pre-nominal adjectives compared to the native French corpus. It was also revealed that some adjectives seem more flexible in translated media. Thus, while French media prefer one position over the other for a specific adjective, the translated media will more easily place the same adjective on either side of the noun. Therefore, we conclude that language contact has a role to play in the positioning of adjectives in TV media in French.

This article deals with the mechanisms that language users employ in historical periods to represent spoken language in writing. I focus on a set of features known as speech descriptors, which allow users to combine representation and evaluation of the speech (and, possibly, of the speaker), such as most disgusting in ‘he used most disgusting language’. The study shows that such speech descriptors in combination with the lemma language are used for a number of sociopragmatic purposes in the Old Bailey Corpus which includes legal materials, especially testimony, from 1720 to 1913. The descriptors can be used to avoid having to repeat a more specific, and possibly offensive and socially or morally inappropriate utterance; they can be used to put the spotlight on the evaluation and impact of the wording rather than the original speech itself; and they can help users mitigate, deflect, or disprove an accusation or guilt. Overall, the article demonstrates that studying the speech of the past must necessarily involve investigating the complex choices made by language users in terms of what to represent, what means to use to represent the speech, and how they evaluate the speech (and speaker).

Despite the creation of regions and communities in the second half of the 20th century for resolving ethnic tensions between the French- and Flemish-speaking communities, provinces are still relevant to understand contemporary Belgian politics. Observing provincial political dynamics is essential to understand multi-level political elite dynamics and territorial cleavages in contemporary Belgium. For instance, political parties are internally structured in provincial federations, and federal elections rely on provincial electoral districts. Combined with constitutional factors such as language and region, this article investigates the provincial origins of ministerial elites in all Belgian federal cabinets between 1980 and 2020. It observes that provinces are far from being perfectly present in a balanced manner in the federal government: some provinces are overrepresented while others – in particular large provinces – are underrepresented. This provincial imbalance is stable over time and independent on the types of cabinet but can be explained by party strategies and vote-seeking considerations.

This article examines how Milla, the Afrikaner protagonist of Marlene van Niekerk’s post-apartheid novel Agaat, engages with others’ empathy toward herself. Theorizing empathy as a multivalent engagement with others’ experiences, I argue that Milla attempts to variously invite, avoid, and manipulate others’ empathy as she negotiates the anxiety of being misunderstood, the sense of vulnerability in being understood, and the dependence of her self-image on others’ opinions. Illustrating the fraught experience of encountering empathy toward oneself—a neglected topic in studies of empathy—the novel shows that empathy is neither always welcomed nor received passively by potential empathizees. Further, I suggest, the contrast between Milla’s approaches to empathy as empathizer and empathizee ironizes her struggles by indicating her proclivity for controlling empathic interactions. Demonstrating how power relations inform empathy, Agaat complicates the popular notion of empathy as a straightforward gateway to reconciliation by highlighting its characters’ ambivalences about receiving empathy.

Scholars frequently portray the end of the Habsburg Monarchy as driven by nationalist revolutions in the provinces. The experience of the Jiu Valley, Transylvania’s largest coal basin, demonstrates that nationalism was neither the only basis for revolution nor the most popular in all parts of the province. The multiethnic working class of Jiu embraced revolution as a response to state failures to provide basic services in a worsening wartime economy, even as state demand for coal rose. The miners created the Black Diamond Republic in October 1918 as Austro-Hungarian armies collapsed in an effort to actively negotiate their status after the war. The miners embraced revolution not as a bid for independence or ethnic secession but as a means to maintain local union power and negotiate the conditions of their inclusion in either Romania or Hungary. While “Romanian” and “Hungarian” councils were formed, such identities in Jiu were also linked to occupation (worker, peasant, or intellectual) rather than clear definitions of ethnicity.

The African liberation movements and the early phases of nation-building on the continent, intertwined with the Cold War and the global student movement, left behind an array of textual, visual, and sonic traces that circulated through underground and clandestine networks across Africa and beyond. These cultural products, which include materials in African languages, remain marginalized in studies of African history and arts. This article posits the cultural underground of decolonization in Africa as a productive category for historical and literary inquiry and argues that exploring the literary and aesthetic aspects of this archive offers other ways of knowing and temporal epistemes important for the reconsideration of aesthetics, politics, and histories in and of Africa. I explore poems and songs from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, and Senegal to show how they provide avenues for a renewed engagement with decolonization and revolution.

This article presents an analysis of vowels in the goat set and /r/ in the Collection of Nineteenth-century Grammars (CNG) (cf. Anderwald 2016). My central questions concern the extent to which grammarians provide evidence for early diphthongisation in goat words and for changes in the distribution of /r/ variants in nineteenth-century prestige accents. I furthermore evaluate how far grammars are suitable as a source for researching historical sound changes. I show that monophthongs are the most frequently proposed variants for goat and are often referred to as ‘improper diphthongs’. Some diphthongal descriptions exist for words in open syllables, before /l/ and before plosives in words like know, soul and boat respectively. Concerning the distribution of /r/, I show that most grammars continued to propose two sounds, which were almost exclusively described as ‘rough’ or ‘trilled’, and ‘smooth’ or ‘soft’. However, some grammarians also argued for /r/ having only one sound in all positions and complete post-vocalic /r/ absence. Overall, the grammars in the CNG display a considerable amount of what I assume to be copying from scholars such as Walker (1791) and Murray (1795). Thus, I argue that great care is required when attempting to infer phonological changes from nineteenth-century grammars.

This article proposes to look back onto the Black Canadian works produced around the turn of the twenty-first century to establish some of the decolonial practices they promoted, arguing that they remain pivotal in decentering the colonial gaze that to this day is at the root of anti-Black hatred. In the face of continued structural violence and anti-Black racism preeminent across Canada to date, it attempts to unpack the purpose and means deployed in their early texts by two pioneer Black Canadian women writers, Djanet Sears and M. NourbeSe Philip, to decolonize African cultural memory from the diaspora by teaching us to value African legacies outside of Eurocentric standards. Drawing from feminist anthropologist Rita Segato, it contends that these texts perform a “counter-pedagogy of cruelty,” that is, an act of resistance to all those sociocultural practices by which people are taught, trained, and hardened to the ongoing commodification of others.

This essay conceptualizes five recipes to solve secession conflicts that have taken place in postcommunist territories—federalization, land-for-peace, protectorate policy, reconquest, and the destruction of the parent state by the patron state—and investigates their merits and demerits. This essay provides case studies of the South Ossetian War in 2008 and its aftermath (as an example of the protectorate policy), the Second Karabakh War in 2020 (reconquest), and the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022 (destruction of the parent state by the patron state). We observe the tendency that the ineffectiveness of federalization and land-for-peace induces parties of conflict to move on to unilateral or even coercive recipes.