In Il serpente, Luigi Malerba's first novel, the writer moves from the objectifying perspective, working-class protagonists, and themes of neorealism to a subjective realism that sets aside the direct dialogue of his first book (La scoperta dell'alfabeto, a collection of brief narratives) in favor of the exterior monologue. The narrating voice of Il serpente feels compelled to relive the guilt, shame, and humiliation of his youth. He prevaricates habitually because he is anxious as to how he appears, primarily to himself: he is caught between the need to express himself and the fear of being punished for having done so. The changes in narrative strategy, along with the psychological plausibility of the narrative and Malerba's analysis of Italy's ‘grey zone’, populated by those who did not actively participate in the civil war following the fall of Fascism, make Il serpente worthy of our close attention.

As a form of social control, undercover tactics played an important state-building role during the Nineteenth Century, in both the United States and France. Yet undercover policing played this role very differently in France than in the US, which made do with a less developed surveillance capacity at all levels of government. The instability of successive French regimes encouraged French political authorities to expand their use of infiltration and to privilege high policing purposes of undercover tactics over the crime-fighting purposes favored by local elites. And while nineteenth-century France, like the United States, often governed through delegations of authority to local elites, French authorities jealously guarded undercover tactics as their exclusive prerogative. As a result, undercover tactics became a marginal crime-fighting tactic in nineteenth century France, becoming identified primarily with the state's surveillance of its political opponents. In the United States, by contrast, the private sector was able to deploy undercover tactics against suspected criminals, organized labor, political radicals, and purveyors of vice. Though the private sector readily accepted delegations from the public sector, the direction of influence also ran in the opposite direction, from the private sector to the state, as American private sector used undercover tactics to replace, bypass, and harness state institutions in ways that their French counterparts could not. In the United States, the private sector's use of undercover tactics came to shape public policing, as prominent detectives entered government and brought their tactics with them, and as Progressive era reformers took up the undercover tactics pioneered by private detectives, modeled them for the state through public-private partnership, and used them to set the anti-corruption, anti-radical, and anti-vice enforcement agenda of government. If French undercover tactics helped to build the French state from the inside out, by consolidating the state's hold over territory and attempting to control disorder and dissent, American undercover tactics became a vector of private sector influence that helped build the state from the outside in by shaping both investigative means and ends at all levels of government.

The way late imperial political elites in China positioned themselves in the tianxia—their life world—can be described as a balance between polity and locality, which was often accompanied by an enduring sense of local identity. This article argues that despite the fall of the tianxia concept in modern China, the age-old locality–polity relationship and the elite local identity did not disappear. Taking the flourishing local gazetteer production of the Republican era as a case, I suggest that instead of suppressing locality, the crisis of the polity and the coming of the nation-state in China brought it more to the foreground. The decline of locality in China's political culture occurred only after the communist takeover. The study makes use of the Local Gazetteer Research Tools (LoGaRT) developed by Max Planck Institute for the History of Sciences.

The importance of settled minorities for facilitating refugee belonging is seldom discussed in research on refugee integration. Drawing on scholarship on belonging, boundary-making, and bordering, this study investigates how boundaries are drawn between settled minorities and refugees in Bulgaria. Based on interviews with integration workers and organizations of settled minorities in a state with the largest historically present Muslim minority in the EU, an Arabic-speaking diaspora settled decades ago, and with minimal state involvement in refugee integration, the study shows how spatial, linguistic, and religious boundaries separate settled minorities from newly arrived refugees. Arabic-speaking diasporas are nevertheless witnessed to overcome the boundaries through geographical proximity, a shared language, and shared countries of origin, whereby they have functioned as facilitators of refugee belonging and inclusion. Furthermore, Muslim institutions led by Bulgarian Turks have functioned as spaces for refugee belonging. The study finds that settled minority communities have, despite multiple boundaries and some assimilatory discourses, contributed to refugee belonging in ways that in part has compensated for the state absence. The study calls for further research investigating the role of settled minorities in inclusionary processes in society.

This article brings to light the lesser-known case of Gagauzia, an autonomous region in Moldova, to examine how global frameworks of authenticity and heritage are drawn upon and performed in three local ethnically centered initiatives. Drawing on data from twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2015 and 2018, this case study provides insight into the ways that notions of nationhood are constructed and perpetuated, with a focus on the role of a specific segment of society, ethnopolitical entrepreneurs. These are neither fully top-down nor bottom-up actors. Focusing on three Gagauzian “firsts” that claim to represent the “last” of disappearing cultural practices and identities, this article interrogates how the given initiatives fuse heritage and innovation to create metacultural discourses that advance notions of Gagauzian ethnic or national particularism. The article gives food for thought about the salience – or not – of elite actors’ articulations of nation, particularly within post-Soviet societies and underscores the array of social actors involved in any nation-building activity. Further, by highlighting the heterogeneity of intersectional, lived experience and articulations of belonging, the article problematizes group-based analysis and methodological nationalism.

This article traces how the ‘wet’ market was integrated into the infrastructure of public housing estates in Hong Kong through modularization from 1969 to 1975. This includes how spatial modularization concepts extended into administration and management, incorporating responsibilities and categories of goods that ultimately reflected colonial ideas of health, food hygiene and social and spatial order. In doing so, this article theorizes how the modular market embodied the ways colonial government departments, architects and managers navigated notions of the materiality of ‘wetness’ in the market through its design in response to management and customer needs, but nevertheless how consumers found ways to re-narrate such spaces through maintaining ‘wet’ cultural exchanges and practices. Using government documents and photographs, this article combines a design historical approach to materiality with empirical evidence to expand on histories and practices of the ‘wet market’, bringing the everyday discourses of modernity in Hong Kong to the fore.

This paper investigates aspectual meanings that resultative morphemes in Mandarin Chinese contribute to interpretations of the entire predicates, and in particular the culmination readings they bring out of the originally non-culminating accomplishments. Two resultative morphemes are studied: -wán and -diào. I argue that while both morphemes give rise to culmination readings, the culmination readings are derived in different ways. I propose that -wán expresses termination, which comments on the progress of an event. The culmination readings of the telicized accomplishments by -wán are obtained indirectly. By contrast, -diào expresses culmination, commenting directly on the resulting culmination state. The proposed analysis for the two morphemes is couched in the framework defined by Krifka (1989, 1992, 1998), which models the relations between events, individuals, and times as a series of homomorphic relations between mereological part structures. Following Zucchi & White (2001), I analyze -diào in terms of a maximalization over patient, which transfers mereological properties from the individual structure to the event structure, explaining the culmination reading, and -wán a maximalization over time, which transfers mereological properties from the time structure to the event structure, explaining termination, and then transfers the mereological properties to the individual structure, explaining the culmination reading.

The treatment of injured Indian soldiers in Britain during WWI deployed particular ways of recording injuries and using them to make judgments about loyalty to the Imperial Army by assessing the soldier’s ability to malinger. This was possible by using personal correspondences between soldiers and their families for ethnographic ends ie. to determine susceptibility to develop mental illness through a soldier’s ethnic background and whether he was from the so-called ‘martial races’ or not. This classificatory knowledge as well as the suspicion towards exaggerated symptoms was also inherited by Indian psychiatry after partition. However, while these psychiatrists reproduced some colonial biases about susceptibility of illness, they were much more receptive to considering the social experience of patients including their kinship relations at home and in the military. By the end of WWII, symptoms came to be regarded as signs of recovery and readjustment to social relations to make a case for the lasting impacts of war on the soldier’s mental and physical health.

In this paper, I demonstrate that a well-known left-right asymmetry, Biberauer, Holmberg and Roberts’s (2014) Final-over-Final Condition (FOFC), which these authors claim follows from Kayne’s Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA), is actually better explained under a symmetric approach to syntactic structure building in tandem with the mechanism that underlies the constraints on rightward movement. Apart from circumventing the theoretical and empirical problems that this LCA-based analysis faces, the fact that particles form a natural class of counterexamples to FOFC naturally follows under such a symmetric approach. The final part of this paper shows that this explanation to FOFC also straightforwardly applies to the semi-universal leftwardness of (subject) specifiers in both head-final and head-initial languages.

Medical acculturation forms a crucial part of the process of migration, and equally, the influx of migrants can shape how medical structures develop in receiving societies – nowhere is that more evident than in the American metropolis. In the late nineteenth century, few ethnic groups caused such sustained bio-hazard concerns as the Irish in America. Poverty and the sheer numbers migrating in the post-Famine (1852-) era, caused the immigrant Irish body to be pathologised, or described in medical terms, to a much greater degree and for longer than their Anglo-Saxon or German counterparts. With a particular focus on Irishwomen’s use of maternity services in New York and Boston, this article aims to elucidate the potential of medical records to flesh out the understandings of how immigrants navigated healthcare. By adopting a case study approach to hospital records in tandem with other data sources, it shows what is being lost through restrictive data protection legislation. It discusses how Irishness was politicised in the contexts of immigration, the social history of medicine and medicalisation.