On 15 September 1970, over 400,000 workers struck General Motors (GM), the biggest corporation in the world. It was a massive walkout, lasting sixty-seven days and affecting 145 GM plants in the US and Canada. GM lost more than $1 billion in profits, and the impact on the US economy was considerable. Despite the strike's size, it has been understudied. Fifty years later, this article provides a re-assessment of this landmark dispute, the first to use detailed archival records of the strike. Refuting claims that the strike lacked drama, I argue that this was a multifaceted – and compelling – story. Primary sources show that workers and union leaders were heavily invested in the battle, which reflected deep-seated local, national, and global issues. The United Automobile Workers (UAW) mobilized significant levels of national and international support, and won a range of concessions, including substantial wage and benefit increases and the ability for workers to retire after thirty years’ service. The strike was deeply infused by local issues and should not just be viewed through the lens of the national GM–UAW relationship. In a broader context, the strike is also important because it occurred at a time of rising global labour militancy, which scholars are increasingly recognizing. Its story contributes to a growing body of literature on the 1970s, a decade that witnessed important activism in many areas.

Two of South African literature’s best-known titles from the turn of the twenty-first century are works of campus fiction that rarely get recognized as such. In this article I read J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) as novels whose figuration of the university is far more central to their treatment of the contradictions and ambiguities that characterize postapartheid South Africa than is generally acknowledged. In the course of narratives that seem largely focused on other things, these texts offer up a distinctly South African but also distinctly postcolonial variety of campus fiction, and a critical engagement with the neoliberal university and the conditions under which upward mobility and intellectual inquiry take shape in the twenty-first-century global south. Coetzee and Mpe suggest capacious and transformative, if also deeply ambivalent, ways of imagining an as-yet unrealized decolonial future for universities.

Investigations of how people have used music to represent, perform, enact and cope with trauma have proliferated in the last decade, although these have often focused on post-World War II musicians and musical phenomena. This work has engaged various methodologies and drawn on myriad bodies of trauma theory in order to better understand the relationships between music and trauma for Holocaust survivors, Cold War- and glasnost-era Eastern European musicians and civilians and soldiers in Iraq. However, despite the growing interest in trauma within music scholarship, scant attention has been paid to relationships between musical phenomena and trauma prior to World War II. And yet, the wars, revolutions, forced displacement, slavery and imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make these years some of the most violent in the histories of modern Europe and the Americas, and thus some of the most important to address when asking questions regarding relationships between music and trauma.

In this special issue's introductory essay, we consider why pre-twentieth century musicians and repertoires have historically not been addressed in scholarly literature. In so doing, we outline the aims of the issue; review relevant literature in musicology and trauma studies; discuss the benefits and challenges of applying trauma theory to nineteenth-century music and musicians and provide readers with information on this special issue's collaborative history. Although giving readers a fleshed-out overview of trauma studies from the nineteenth century to present is outside the scope of this article, this introduction nevertheless provides enough background on the status and main ideas of trauma research from the mid-nineteenth century to present day to facilitate comprehension of how the research showcased in this special issue relates to social, historical and political conceptions of trauma.

Teju Cole’s Open City is often read as the quintessential Western cosmopolitan novel. But despite the protagonist’s fixation with European aestheticism, the presence of African antecedents looms almost as an unacknowledged shadow in the acclaimed cosmopolitan novel. This article traces how Yorùbá visual registers about perception, subjectivity, and representation provide interpretative cues for understanding the meta-text of Cole’s novel in ways that illuminate the conflicted, contradictory itineraries of the postcolonial African transnational figure. I argue that Yorùbá conceptual registers relating to visuality, especially the concept of Àwòrán and its insistence on intersubjective relations and the visual call of images, highlight a visual hermeneutics that inflect the construction of personhood in Open City. By tracing the centrality of Yorùbá optic codes to Cole’s project, the article concludes that the novel’s philosophically dense conversation with aspects of Yorùbá culture demonstrates how conceptual registers from African cultures might contour Afro-diasporic texts.

Clinical linguistic diversity extends far beyond ‘specific language’ disorders, such as acquired aphasia or specific language impairment (SLI), to a large range of mental disorders that are not language-specific. As cognitive impairments are involved in the latter, models with an integrated approach to language and cognition can be useful for understanding and classifying the variation in question. The aim of this paper is to specify such a model, called the Bridge model, which views linguistic cognition as resting on two partially pre-linguistic pillars: (i) perceptual categorisation and (ii) social-communicative interaction. Grammar acting as a bridge crossing between them mediates the lexicalisation of perceptual categories and, based on these, new forms of social interaction and communication conveying thought structured by grammar. This model allows to conceptualise mental disorders as different ways in which this integrated linguistic-cognitive phenotype can deviate from its normal course. We illustrate our general model for the specific instance of language variation within autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

In the summer of 1894, Claud Cardew, then at British Central Africa, asked his brother in England to send him a violin. In tracing the violin's trajectory from metropole to colony, this article combines two inquiries. It probes, firstly, the emotional vocabulary surrounding Claud's request, and secondly, the technology underpinning the British Empire mail. Closely reading the Cardew family letters alongside postal documents, the author argues that for Claud, the violin's delayed arrival triggered a tangled nexus of anxieties, stemming from both the colonial racial hierarchy and the changing expectations surrounding modern technology. Much like the cultural connotations carried by the violin itself, efficient mail delivery denoted racial superiority. Furthermore, the empire mail gained significance in the minds of British users for its racially loaded function as potentially mitigating colonizers’ anxiety in the face of outnumbering locals. Yet the violin's failure to arrive when expected led to mounting anxiety, as claims for colonizers’ dominance cracked in the face of unstable postal communications. The story of Claud Cardew's violin thus offers a framework that may be used to unravel similar emotional entanglements surrounding Western technologies set to work within empire.

This article explores how the meanings individuals ascribed to kin-state citizenship change in the long term. Previous research has looked at the real-time acquisition of citizenship and established three dimensions of meanings individuals ascribe to citizenship: identity, instrumental, and legitimacy. Building on the case of Croats from Herzegovina (BiH), who acquired citizenship back in the 1990s, the article demonstrates how meanings individuals ascribe to citizenship change over time across each dimension—subject to the perception of inclusion into the kin-state, type and the extent of opportunities kin-states provide, as well as the routinization of citizenship practices. By disaggregating each dimension further, the article extends the understanding of kin-state citizenship and shows how individuals respond to the policy implementation’s overall dynamics by aligning the meanings they ascribe to citizenship. Therefore, future work should look more closely at the interplay between state policy dynamics and its impact on individuals.

In contrast with the distorted and romanticized images reproduced by far-right narratives, we argue in this study that the constructive ideals of “nation” held by Italy’s Giuseppe Mazzini and Turkey’s Ziya Gökalp, from two later examples of European nationalism, could fit into what might be called a “proto-modernism” within nationalism theories. It is proposed that both Mazzini and Gökalp went through ideological transformations that made them firm opponents of German Romanticism and ardent believers of the Enlightenment, as shown in their non-exclusionary approaches to nationalism. They both rejected essentialist (religious, ethnic, racial, etc.) rationales for the backwardness of their respective countries and maintained the necessity of constructing nations that would initially provide civic equality among citizens and then aim at normative equality among nations at the civilizational level. In that sense, our analysis finds four fundamental similarities between Mazzini and Gökalp with regard to their national ideals: loyalty to the principles of the Enlightenment, national self-determination, civic-legal equality among citizens, and normative equality among all nations.