This article offers a fresh account of the colonial processes that upended Muslim juridical regimes in South Asia between 1808 and 1885. Based on unexplored sources in Arabic and English, the discussion is set in the South Indian coastal towns of today’s Kerala and Tamilnad, where Muslims practiced Shafi‘i law and were not subject to continuous Muslim rule at any point in history. Given their longue-durée experience of non-Muslim rule, the Shafi‘i jurists had to rethink classical jurisprudential norms to empower the learned Muslims (the ‘ulama) as alternative sources of authority, so that they could elect and dismiss Islamic law judges (qazis) as their local leaders in the coastal towns. Qazis thus emerged and operated as a bastion of Shafi‘i power and Shafi‘i religious authority in the region. Once the British Empire claimed the mantle of the Mughal Empire that practiced Hanafi law, it could not as easily bring these Shafi‘is into its imperial fold. Their juridical autonomy provoked fears of political subversion for the British Empire in the wake of the 1857 rebellion, prompting its officials to bring the Shafi‘is under direct government control and reconfigure the community-elected qazis, which were the foci of Shafi‘i leadership.

The global political order that emerged from 1919 inscribed Jews into two distinct legal roles under the League of Nations system: a model national minority in the new nation-states of Eastern Europe, and a virtual national majority in British Mandatory Palestine. Despite extensive scholarship on each of these stories, we know precious little about how they interacted in the interwar Jewish political imagination. In this article I track several key East European Zionist intellectuals through the period between World War I and the aftermath of World War II as they attempted to imagine a new geometry of transnational nationhood via international law. This account of their pursuit of national self-determination beyond sovereignty reveals the promise and limits of interwar Jewish worldmaking and provides an index of the changing meaning of nationhood itself in the interwar period.

The 1970s saw intense discussions among feminists about the patriarchal family. While radical feminists called for complete withdrawal from marriage and motherhood, others attempted to reconfigure the roles of parents and children in the light of feminism. A particularly vibrant discussion unfolded in the feminist magazine Effe, published in Rome between 1973 and 1982, evolving from a largely negative to a more nuanced view of motherhood by the late 1970s. The notion of love was central. Effe writers asked how love could be separated from care and if it was really so natural. They stressed how maternal love needed to be balanced with children’s need for freedom and autonomy and reflected on their experiences as daughters as well as mothers. While excessive love could be harmful, there was radical potential in the notion of the loved and wanted child. Many proposed collective solutions to child-rearing, while others stressed the sensual pleasures of motherhood. Using a history of the emotions lens, this article teases out the complexities and contradictions of Italian feminist thinking about motherhood. Although the space for more positive evaluations expanded over time, Effe was ultimately more successful in reclaiming pregnancy as a feminist experience than motherhood itself.

Despite growing interest in African varieties of French, few attempts have been made to examine them from a variationist perspective. This contribution aims to use phonetic variation as a vantage point for exploring language ideologies surrounding the use of French in postcolonial contexts. The study focuses on the French variety spoken in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and draws on a bilingual Lingala–French dataset elicited from L1 Lingala speakers. The sample reflects a key social distinction in Kinshasa: that between long-term urban residents and recent rural migrants. Are there multiple phonetic varieties of Kinshasa French? To what extent do their forms merely reflect variation in Lingala? The study finds that the most focused variety of Kinshasa French is strongly associated with urban women and is approximated to varying degrees by rural migrants, particularly women. In addition to features with likely origins in either rural or urban Lingala, Kinshasa French exhibits hypercorrect forms and features that may mirror variation trends in Parisian French.

Delving into fraternal succession, intermarriage practices, and levirate marriages of the Northern Qi dynasty (550–577), this article demonstrates that these practices served as pillars of stability for the imperial family. In this exploration, Empress Dowager Lou 婁太后 (501–562) emerges as the central figure behind these practices, playing a pivotal role in their implementation and wielding immense power as kingmaker. Starting from before the official reign of the Northern Qi, she personally chose her husband, laid the groundwork for him to become regent of the preceding Eastern Wei (534–550) court, and controlled the succession system to seat her own sons as emperors of the Northern Qi. Drawing on her Xianbei 鮮卑 roots, Empress Dowager Lou enforced an agenda of Inner Asian practices and politics in her pursuit to consolidate the rule and identity of the Northern Qi imperial family.