This article uses Joan Baez's impersonations of Bob Dylan from the mid-1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first century as performances where multiple fields of complementary discourse converge. The article is organized in three parts. The first part addresses the musical details of Baez's acts of mimicry and their uncanny ability to summon Dylan's predecessors. The second considers mimicry in the context of identity, specifically race and asymmetrical power relations in the history of American popular music. The third and final section analyses her imitations in the context of gender and reproductive labour, focusing on the way various media have shaped her persona and her relationship to Dylan. The article engages critical theoretical work informed by psychoanalysis, post-colonial theory, and Marxist feminism.

In Kenya, debates about sexual orientation have assumed center stage at several points in recent years, but particularly before and after the promulgation of the Constitution of Kenya in 2010. These debates have been fueled by religious clergy and by politicians who want to align themselves with religious organizations for respectability and legitimation, particularly by seeking to influence the nation's legal norms around sexuality. I argue that through their responses and attempts to influence legal norms, the religious and political leaders are not only responsible for the nonacceptance of same-sex relationships in Africa, but have also ensured that sexuality and embodiment have become a cultural and religious battleground. These same clergy and politicians seek to frame homosexuality as un-African, unacceptable, a threat to African moral and cultural sensibilities and sensitivities, and an affront to African moral and family values. Consequently, the perception is that homosexuals do not belong in Africa—that they cannot be entertained, accommodated, tolerated, or even understood. Ultimately, I argue that the politicization and religionization of same-sex relationships in Kenya, as elsewhere in Africa, has masked human rights debates and stifled serious academic and pragmatic engagements with important issues around sexual difference and sexual orientation while fueling negative attitudes toward people with different sexual orientations.

In this paper, I revisit the question of how and in what sense can individuals comprising a group be held responsible for morally reprehensible behaviour by that group. The question is tackled by posing a counterfactual: what would happen if selfish individuals became moral creatures? A game called the Samaritan’s Curse is developed, which sheds light on the dilemma of group moral responsibility, and raises new questions concerning ‘conferred morality’ and self-fulfilling morals, and also forces us to question some implicit assumptions of game-theory.

It has been suggested that metaphor often performs some sort of evaluative function. However, there have been few empirical studies addressing this issue. Moreover, little is known about the extent to which a metaphor needs to be creative in order to perform an evaluative function, or whether there are differences according to the type of evaluation, such as its degree of explicitness and its polarity. In order to investigate these questions, 94 film reviews from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) were annotated for creative and conventional metaphor, and for positive and negative, inscribed and invoked evaluation. Approximately half of the metaphors in our corpus were found to perform an evaluative function. Creative metaphors were significantly more likely to perform an evaluative function than conventional metaphors. Metaphorical evaluation was found to be significantly more negative than non-metaphorical evaluation. Both creative and conventional metaphors were used more frequently to perform inscribed evaluation than invoked evaluation. However, the tendency towards inscribed evaluation was stronger for conventional metaphors than for creative metaphors. From a theoretical perspective, these findings call into question fundamental assumptions about the role of metaphor in performing evaluation, such as the claim, made in the Systemic Functional Linguistics literature, that metaphor invariably ‘provokes’ attitudinal meanings. We have shown that it can do so, but that it does not always do so. The study also offers methodological contributions, by introducing a new protocol for the annotation of creative metaphors as well as detailed guidelines for coding evaluation at different levels of explicitness.

Italian mobility played a fundamental part in the history of the peninsula, since it was a global phenomenon reaching every continent except Antarctica. The Italian diaspora counted over 26 million expatriates who left the country between 1876 and 1976 and, to date, Italy remains one of the states that has contributed the most to the Great European Migration. Although impressive, these figures do not take into account pre-unitary Italian mobilities or Italian settlements in colonial territories. By adopting the perspective of environmental history of migration, this collection of essays allows us to consider various contextually embedded migratory environments, creating a means to find common constitutive features that allow us to explore and identify Italianness. Specifically, in this special issue, we intend to investigate how Italians transformed remote foreign environments in resemblances of their distant faraway homeland, their paesi, as well as used them as a means of materially re-imagining landscapes of Italianness. In return, their collective and individual identities were transformed by the new surroundings.

This article presents comparative research on the role of towns and urban networks in the process of constructing space during conquest and colonization in selected ‘non-Roman’ regions of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It focuses on Kulmerland in Prussia and Meath in Ireland. In both regions, the creation of urban networks and new regional spaces entailed the use of pre-existing settlement. However, reception intensity was determined by both the state of preservation of the earlier settlement and the needs of territorial authorities. This comparison shows ways of using symbolic potential (names, central places) and former settlement points for the construction of cities. In both territories, the functions of central places were particularized due to subinfeudation.