A major challenge presented by noun class systems of Senufo languages is the non-trivial interaction between the agreement features of the noun phrase and the noun class specification on the head noun. In Kafire (Senufo, Côte d’Ivoire), demonstratives normally agree with the head noun independent of whether or not the head noun is modified by adjectives. Some adjectives, however, are exceptions to the general rule: in their presence the demonstrative appears in Class 2 or 3 (depending on the adjective), and fails to agree with the head noun. We present an account of the exceptional behavior of such adjectives within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar. We show that agreement in Kafire is a heterogeneous phenomenon that is best viewed as transitional between a system of semantically motivated agreement and a system of noun classes that is no longer dependent on meaning. Vestiges of the old system have been preserved in a variety of phenomena that have to be addressed individually using different kinds of formal tools provided by the framework. The variety of formal devices required to describe the functioning of the agreement system reflects the complex diachrony and the cross-modal (lexico-syntactic) synchronic nature of agreement phenomena.

Illness severity is a priority setting criterion in several countries. Age seems to matter when considering severity, but perhaps not small age differences. In the following article we consider Small Differences (SD): small differences in age are not relevant when considering differential illness severity. We show that SD cannot be accommodated within utilitarian, prioritarian or egalitarian theories. Attempting to accommodate SD by postulating a threshold model becomes exceedingly complex and self-defeating. The only way to accommodate SD seems to be to accept some form of relevance view, where some age differences are irrelevant. This view can accommodate SD, but at the expense of consistent priority orderings. Severity thus becomes unsuitable for systematic decision-making. We argue that SD should be dismissed and that we should accept a continuous relationship between severity of illness and age.

Based on a close reading of 118 Tang epitaphs for those who died young, this paper explores how Tang parents remembered and recounted their children's lives as well as factors that contributed to the rise of intense expression of mourning. It finds that while descriptions in epitaphs for adults largely followed Confucian ideals of life course and gender roles, the epitaphs for the young are much less formulaic, allowing space and latitude for parents and families to impart anecdotes and emotions. More importantly, it argues that the rise of epitaphs for children (especially for daughters in the ninth century) reflected a strong influence of Buddhist perception of death and Buddhist mourning rituals. As a result, Tang parents ignored the restrictions and decorum stipulated in The Book of Rites and mourned their children with outward grief, regardless their age and gender.

I will begin by thanking Professor Quayson and all of the contributors to this forum with the deepest of gratitude. I deem it a great privilege to have been engaged with in such depth and seriousness by such a group of superb interlocutors, all of whom seem nearly completely to have understood my project, even when more negatively reflecting on it. As a version of the Talmud would have said: it is far better to be understood by one’s opponents than to be misread by one’s supporters. Even those who have most highly approbated my thinking here have done so in ways that have taught me much and challenged me to match the precision of my thinking to theirs. So I welcome both the approbation and the reprobation. In this response—and following the guidance of Professor Quayson—I will not answer or comment point by point or even author by author but give a somewhat expanded account of what I am about that will show, I hope, the manner in which I concede some arguments to the opponents and understand myself better having read carefully the proponents of my views.

In May 2015, I happened to visit Frankfurt am Main, where during my haphazard exploration of the city I blindly strolled into the building of the Bockenheimer Depot where a new opera was to premiere that evening. It was entitled “Am unseren Fluße” (By Our River), as I saw on the banner outside, and I thought it would be something ecological. I was more interested in the building than in the show, but the decorations of which I could get a glimpse from the lobby and an animated Bohemian crowd drew me in. It turned out to be a powerfully moving piece allegorizing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and by extension all human territorial conflicts of that kind, bringing out the absurdity inherent in all territorial claims, profiteering by third parties, humanity’s shared frailty, and love that transcends this all. Some reviewers later referred to it as a “Middle Eastern Romeo and Juliet.”

This study applies a genealogical mode of enquiry to the history of tigers as a symbol of Korea and the Korean people. The zoomorphic idea of Korea as a tiger is conventionally traced to the writings of the intellectual, Ch'oe Namsŏn (1890–1957). However, we argue that while Ch'oe was the first to link tigers with modern Korean nationalism, low levels of literacy and Ch'oe's later ambiguous status as a Japanese “collaborator” meant his promotion of the tiger symbol failed to gain traction. Instead, we locate the making of the modern Korean tiger metaphor in multiple post-colonial sites of cultural inscription, including national newspapers, zoos and museums, which generate and diffuse narratives about the ancient and continuous origins of the Korean people. In particular, it was during the 1980s that the successful Seoul Olympic bid and the Chŏn dictatorship's cultural policy converged to facilitate the “rediscovery” of the tiger as a national symbol with a supposedly ancient heritage, and with Ch'oe and his problematic legacy effaced. We also observe a continuing resistance to Japanese hegemony and a post-colonial construction of Korean identity through the recasting of the tiger – originally a Japanese symbol of Korea – in a new light.

This article discusses the operation of memory as an effect of narrative structure in The Gift of Rain, with a particular focus on the spatial and temporal mobility of narratorial perspective. Tan’s novel is situated within Malaysian writing in English, a body of minor literature in a minority language amid the country’s promotion of Bahasa as the linguistic medium for a national literature, alongside the attendant racialization of language. However, the status of The Gift of Rain as a world Anglophone novel, which circulates transnationally while depicting trans-temporal and cross-spatial trajectories, imaginatively inscribes Malaysia with a more multifarious assemblage of its cultural origins through the hybridity and queer temporality of its protagonist. Further temporal and spatial mobilities emerge in the dynamic relationship between the novel’s frame and inner narratives, where the reading experience is akin to memory processes. The veracity of fiction as memory intervenes into historical inscription and so resists the pervasive ethno-nationalism that limits cultural discourse in Malaysia.

In his provocative article “The New Jewish Question,” Daniel Boyarin has offered a view of the Jewish nation as a collective identity that is not only diasporic but also “counter-sovereign.” I found his reappraisal of the history of Zionism very informative. Unfortunately, I do not have the competence to engage with it. But I do have a few things to say about his more general claim regarding the possibility of nationalism being dissociated from sovereignty.

In this article I attempt to lay out at least the bones of an argument for a shift in the terms of world Jewish life. Against the Hobson’s choice of “religion” or “state,” I offer an older paradigm of diaspora nation, the Yiddishe Folk. Because I am opposed to both the mononational state and cosmopolitanism (of the classic Appiah-like variety), I work out a description (not fully defined) of diaspora that comprises dual loyalties, to the place where I am and especially its oppressed people and to others of my nation scattered in many places (ideally!). This statement constitutes a vade mecum to a longer manifesto to be published by Yale University Press, late in 2022.

My old friend Daniel Boyarin has raised, not for the first time, the problem of whether one can imagine what he calls “an ethical form of Jewish collective continuity.” He strikes out against the notion of such a “Jewish” ethical continuity seeing it having been negated in the present discussion, the negation driven by two arguments, “[Christian] supersessionism” on the right and “territorial nationalism” on the left. Whether it is possible “to inform prejudice against collective Jewish continuity is perhaps mitigated when Jews per se are obviously the objects of collective discrimination, and correspondingly exacerbated when Jews as a collective appear to be ‘powerful’ or ‘secure.’” Anti-Semitism or the “model minority.”

My abiding memory of Daniel Boyarin is sitting with him on the top deck of one of London’s famous red buses. We were traveling to Golders Green to eat a kosher meal after a conference in central London. It was the summer of 1994, at the height of Western optimism that the Oslo Accords would bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an end. This optimism, however naive, resulted in an extraordinary phenomenon. Closeted Jews in the British academy attended the conference by the hundreds. The late Laura Marcus and I, who organized “Modernity, Culture, and ‘the Jew,’” were expecting a handful of specialists along with the invited speakers, such as Daniel Boyarin. Instead, the audience was made up of a rainbow alliance of out-Jews and other others who could no longer fit on a single red bus but needed a fleet of double-deckers. This was a time when a new iteration of Jewish studies—feminist, fluidly gendered, postcolonial, antiracist, anti-Eurocentric—came into being and has, thankfully, influenced future generations of scholars.2 No less important, it was a time of a momentary and unspoken hope that the world could be healed and that tikkun olam (the “repair of the world”) might at long last be on the horizon.