The mid-1920s to the 1950s witnessed the uneasy imbrication of the rural, the peasantry, and women as symbols and subjects of the nation in the era of anti colonial and socialist movements in both India and China. This essay examines this rural/peasant/woman nexus within conflicting representations of the peasant woman as embodiment of the nation's past, present and future, to map a range of connected global political-aesthetic imaginations of Indian and Chinese nationhood. A close analysis of the convergence of three texts – Pearl Buck's novel, The Good Earth (1931), Katherine Mayo's polemic, Mother India (1927), and Indian director Mehboob Khan's re-staging and transformation of both in his 1957 film, Mother India – opens up to a wider set of entangled Indian and Chinese co-texts within an expanded space of global aesthetic circulation. Together, these texts reveal a contested history of representations of the rural, the peasantry, and women in projections of Indian and Chinese national becoming that, in the end, cannot be easily recuperated or consolidated within singular nation-state narratives.

A Copper Age settlement and cemetery was fully excavated at Rákóczifalva-Bivaly-tó Site 1/C in 2005-2007, making it possible to compare the use of its material culture in closely related, coeval, but different archaeological contexts. Such a rare set of circumstances allows the authors to highlight methodological issues associated with the distorting effect of archaeological finds made on sites where only settlement or burial data are available, and on the importance of choosing appropriate analytical units.

While Coca-Cola portrays itself as a ‘water neutrality’ leader, its failures during Cape Town’s water crisis exemplify the changing nature of corporate human rights obligations in the face of climate change. Between 2015 and 2018, drought conditions plunged Cape Town into a crisis, leading to increasingly strict household water restrictions and depriving families of their constitutionally guaranteed water allowance.1 However, in December 2017, when Cape Town officials called for a 45% reduction in commercial water use, Coca-Cola’s local independent bottler – Coca-Cola Peninsula Beverages (CCPB) – refused to reduce its 44 million-litre monthly withdrawals.2 The city subjected households to water restrictions and price increases up to 556%, while businesses only saw a 104% price increase with no consumption restrictions.3

For a certain subset of eminent Beethoven scholars, the celebration of Beethoven's 250th birthday in 2020 represented a challenge. In taking up the opportunity to communicate with a wider population of educated music lovers, the standard vehicle, a Beethoven biography, was off the table for them – because they had already written one. In the three books reviewed here, each author responds to this dilemma by focusing on themes in reception history. I will attempt to clarify their main points, comment on similarities and differences in their approaches, and evaluate how successful each one might be in in making recent Beethoven scholarship more accessible for the general reader. I will argue that all three of these books successfully target the more musically literate segment of lay readers, and that any weak points arise at the intersection between their academic content and the address to these members of their presumed readership.

In memory of Nicholas Temperley

The title of John Fuller Maitland's article ‘Wanted – An Opera’, in which he argued for the establishment in Britain of a state-supported national opera house, could almost be read as a statement of desire for an operatic work of British origin itself. The perception that composers produced little opera of value in the period of the so-called ‘British Music Renaissance’ has become a trope, despite research in recent years showing the extent of activity, both in terms of composition and performance, during the 20 years either side of 1900.