The Aswan High Dam was a cornerstone of two overlapping political projects. For Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the dam symbolized a bright future in which the decolonized Egyptian people could finally claim their destinies and triumph over the twin forces of imperialism and nature. The Soviet-assisted megaproject acquired such symbolic importance that Nasser’s security apparatus carefully policed its representations in Egyptian society, culture, and intellectual life. For the USSR, by contrast, the dam symbolized Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s break with the Stalinist past, initiated in his famous February 1956 “secret speech” that criticized Stalin’s draconian repressions, isolationism in international affairs, and neglect of “the East.” Even as it led to economic, scientific technical, and cultural agreements with Afro-Asian states including Egypt, Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization agenda loosened controls over political speech at home, unleashing powerful new political ideas, forces, and artistic trends. This brief essay will explore the overlap between the two projects, asking where they met and diverged and what this means for studies of political, cultural, and environmental history.

The September 2015 military intervention launched in Syria by Vladimir Putin at the invitation of Bashar al-Asad marked Russia’s tangible return to the Middle East and initiated a 180-degree turn in the course of the ongoing war. Four years after the beginning of the Syrian revolution, its repression, and its escalation into war, Moscow’s military involvement became a testing ground for Russian martial strategies, including “nonmilitary” measures and communication strategies. By exploring both textual and visual content posted on social media by Russian war reporters deployed in Syria between September 2015 and January 2020, in this essay I seek to highlight the ties between the embedded narratives around the on-site military intervention for Russian-speaking audiences, and the longstanding Russian Orientalist fascination with the Middle East.

Mukti Mangharam’s Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture, conducts a though investigation into the culture and ideology of neoliberal capitalism being produced in India today. But Mangharam’s approach is not to dismiss but to take seriously the appeal of individualism and entrepreneurism among its target audience: ordinary people looking for a way out of the material crises that neoliberalism has produced. In this response to Freedom Inc., Pranav Jani recognizes the empathetic and democratic impulse in Mangharam’s method and narrative style and finds a parallel in his own work as a scholar and organizer. How can scholars and activists concerned with the voice of the people recognize the fundamental heterogeneity of popular consciousness, neither romanticizing struggle nor foreclosing the possibility of reform, or even revolutionary change?

This survey introduces the reader to the history of international zones. It argues that they offer striking insights into peacekeeping during the transition from a world of formal empires to one dominated by sovereign states. While the study of international zones is not new, there has been little examination of internationalization in practice. The survey suggests some of the benefits of adopting this approach and findings it might unearth.

This exploratory text proposes a US imperial ‘research perspective’ on post-war post-colonial cities – cities that the United States did not colonially occupy, i.e. not cities like Manila, 1898–1946. US imperial actors and interests helped shape such cities, and in turn were shaped by their people and structures. Importantly, the US case seems to strengthen the general recent view, also regarding formal empires, that it makes little sense to posit the existence of an imperial city type, and more sense to use ‘the imperial urban’ as a research perspective.

The city of Sapporo, founded in 1869 by the Japanese government as a colonial headquarters in Hokkaido, developed as part of a global wave of settler-colonial urbanism. Like counterparts in North America and Australia, Sapporo facilitated economic, environmental and political transformations across Hokkaido that led to the displacement of Indigenous Ainu society by a soon overwhelming number of ethnically Japanese settlers. However, several historical factors distinguish Sapporo’s settler-colonial urbanism from its peers, including the long history of relations between the Ainu and Japanese; the heavy role of the Japanese state in Sapporo; and the lack of mass relocations of the Ainu to reservations far from their traditional homes.

This paper deals with a construction, which we dub Non-Agreeing Degree (NAD) constructions, with the distinguishing property that the agreement pattern between subjects and degree predicates is optionally disrupted, even in languages (like Spanish) where verbs commonly agree with their subjects. We show that the agreeing versus non-agreeing alternation comes with important semantic differences for the interpretation of the degree construction. We provide a first systematic description of this type of constructions and postulate a formal syntactic and semantic analysis. We argue that NAD constructions are characterized by degree predicates that introduce a non-conventional nominal scale and by subjects that are interpreted as equally non-conventional units of measurement. We postulate an intensionalization process on the subject of NAD constructions, which we capture via a general nominalization function that allows a default as well as an ordinary agreement pattern between subject and copula.

Sir Clements Markham (1830-1916), secretary of the Royal Geographical Society for many decades, is best known for his role in shaping the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration and especially the career of his protege Robert Falcon Scott. His unpublished work of Franklin Expedition fiction, a 350-page handwritten manuscript held in the collection of the RGS, is an understudied artefact which has much to say about Markham’s life, work, and ideology. A work of fact-based history, yet also a fantasy on themes of chivalry, his 1899 novel James Fitzjames…, while occasionally mined for biographical information by scholars of the 19th-century Arctic, has never been fully evaluated on its own terms. An initial read reveals various preoccupations: Christian spirituality; the male body in extremis; loyalty to the imperial hierarchy; and a deep interest in establishing James Fitzjames as a heroic figure for posterity. In this paper, I aim to uncover various meanings embedded in this romance, place it into the ongoing literary afterlife of the Franklin Expedition, and demonstrate some of the insights it can offer regarding Markham’s role as a vital figure in the history of polar exploration.