The 1845 British polar expedition in search of a northwest passage through the Canadian Arctic under the command of Sir John Franklin resulted in the greatest loss of life event in the history of polar exploration. The names of the 129 officers and crew who sailed and died on the catastrophic voyage are known, but the identification of their skeletons found scattered along the route of their attempted escape is problematic. Here, we report DNA analyses from skeletal remains from King William Island, where the majority of the expedition fatalities occurred, and from a paternal descendant of a member of the expedition. A match was found between an archaeological sample and a presumed descendant sample using Y-chromosome haplotyping. We conclude that DNA and genealogical evidence confirm the identity of the remains as those of Warrant Officer John Gregory, Engineer, HMS Erebus. This is the first member of the 1845 Franklin expedition whose identity has been confirmed through DNA and genealogical analyses.

This article investigates the contribution made by indigenous employees to the work of the Hong Kong Observatory from its inception and into the early twentieth century. As has so often been the case in Western histories of science, the significance of indigenous workers and of women in the Hong Kong Observatory has been obscured by the stories of the government officials and observatory director(s). Yet without the employees, the service could not have functioned or grown. While the glimpses of their work and lives are fleeting, often only revealed in minor archival references, this article seeks to interrogate these sources to make these workers’ lives visible and to offer an examination of everyday working relationships at this place and point in time. It focuses on three areas. First, an exploration of who these workers were, and the role they played at the observatory. Second, an investigation of their contribution to the nascent science of meteorology. Third, an examination of available evidence – levels of high staff turnover, complaints, instances of foot dragging, or working to rule, as well as the tenacity to continue for years under difficult working conditions – to demonstrate the ability of workers to reject or to negotiate with colonial/patriarchal authority. In profiling their stories, this article will add to the literature examining the lives of scientific workers and their contributions to science, the everyday cultural and social contexts of colonial meteorology, and the role of ordinary men and women in producing meteorological knowledge at this time.

When humanity has either suppressed coronavirus disease 2019 or learned to come to terms with its continued existence, governments and corporations probably return to their prepandemic stances. Solutions to the world’s problems are sought from technology and business innovations, not from considerations of equality and well-being for all. This is in stark contrast with the pandemic-time situation. Many governments, at least initially, listened to the recommendations of expert advisers, most notably public health authorities, who proceeded from considerations of equality and common good. I suggest that we should continue on this path when the immediate threat of the disease is over. Other crises are already ongoing—poverty, conflicts, climate change, financial bubbles, and so on—and it would be good to use expert knowledge rather than interests and ideologies in dealing with them. To assist in this, I outline the characteristics of a new kind of counsellor, impartial adviser, who is normatively motivated by a sense of copathy and who takes into account all views, nice and not-so-nice alike. I illustrate the nature and ideological orientation of copathic impartial advisers by placing them on a map of justice and examining their relationships with the main political moralities of our time.

This paper offers a first analysis of the philosophy of history developed by Jian Bozan (1898–1968), the author of China's earliest comprehensive exposition of historical materialism. Despite his central importance for the establishment of professional historical studies in PRC, the existing studies neglect Jian's original contribution to the development of Chinese Marxism and his pre-war works in general, focusing solely on his participation in the debate over the relation between history and theory in the 1960s. The paper seeks to fill this lacuna by providing a critical account of Jian Bozan's understanding of historical laws, progress, the stages of history, human freedom and the class struggle. Jian's synthesis of historicism and historical materialism, which at a time was seen as an alternative to the Maoist view of history, was officially condemned during the Cultural Revolution and led to his premature death. However, this paper demonstrates that, following the public rehabilitation of the thought of Jian Bozan in 1978, it was his system that had an important impact on the historiography in Dengist China. Furthermore, the paper argues that Jian's approach to historical materialism brought many novelties in relation to the preceding Sino-Marxist views of history.

This article explores how hope and visions of the future have left their mark on media discourse in Turkey. Looking back at some of the events that took place in the 1980s, a decade that was shaped by the aftermath of the 1980 coup d’état, and considering them alongside what has happened since the ban of Istanbul’s Pride march in 2015, it examines traces of hope in two periods of recent Turkish history characterized by authoritarianism. Drawing on an array of visual and textual material drawn from the tabloid press, magazines, newspapers, and digital platforms, it inquires into how queer hope manages to infiltrate mediated publics even in times of pessimism and hopelessness. Based upon analysis of an archive of discourses on resistance, solidarity, and future, it argues that queer hope not only helps to map out possible future routes for queer lives in (and beyond) Turkey, but also operates as a driving political force that sustains queers’ determination to maintain their presence in the public sphere despite repressive nationalist, militarist, Islamist, and authoritarian regimes.

The Macedonia name dispute was resolved in 2018 with the signing of the Prespa Agreement. Ambassador Nimetz – one of the key players in the solution efforts – queried recently “Why did it take us so long?”, echoing the confusion of foreign observers about what has routinely been seen as an incomprehensible spat. This article provides more context about the past intractability of the dispute by focusing on the role of Greek public opinion. Taking stock of the literature on the relationship between foreign policy-making and public opinion, our analysis identifies key parameters for investigating the influence of Greek public opinion on policy. We test these parameters against empirical data from a comprehensive poll on the name dispute that was conducted in 2016, only a few months before the start of the negotiations that led to the Prespa Agreement. Our analysis demonstrates the extent and depth of the Greek public’s opposition to any compromise, as well as the emotional involvement in the Macedonia name dispute. The findings have implications for our understanding of the process that led to the settlement of the dispute as well as the challenges of implementing the agreement.

Cynicism styles itself as the answer to the mental suffering produced by disillusionment, disappointment, and despair. It seeks to avoid them by exposing to ridicule naive idealism or treacherous hope. Modern cynics avoid the vulnerability produced by high ideals, just as their ancient counterparts eschewed dependence on all but the most essential of material needs. The philosophical tradition of the Cynics begins with the Ancients, including Diogenes and Lucian, but has found contemporary valence in the work of cultural theorists such as Peter Sloterdijk. This article uses theories of cynicism to analyze postcolonial disappointment in Irish modernism. It argues that in the “ambi-colonial” conditions of early-twentieth-century Ireland, the metropolitan surety of and suaveness of a cynical attitude is available but precarious. We therefore find a recursive cynicism that often turns upon itself, finding the self-distancing and critical sure-footedness of modern, urbane cynicism a stance that itself should be treated with cynical scepticism. The essay detects this recursive cynicism in a number of literary works of post-independence Ireland, concluding with an extended consideration of W. B. Yeats’s great poem of civilizational precarity, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.”

Energy transition in the European Union (EU) and its Member States involves questions of federalism, which are subject to various perspectives. The distribution of powers cannot be properly understood using classical legal methodology alone because Articles 192 to 194 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) contain too many ambiguous political compromises. On the one hand, Article 192(1) TFEU (on the environment) and Article 194(1) and (2)(1) TFEU (on energy) enable EU legislation on energy transition through the ordinary legislative procedure, including majority voting in the European Parliament and the Council. On the other hand, there are significant textual limits for EU action in neighbouring provisions with a ‘sovereignty exception’ for the Member States in both Article 192(2) and Article 194(2)(2) TFEU. This article argues that, in the light of the Paris Agreement, the allocation of competences between the EU and its Member States should, in case of doubt, be understood in such a way that effective climate protection becomes possible. Because under Article 191(1) TFEU the EU is to promote measures at the international level to combat climate change, such an international law-friendly interpretation is part of a legitimate teleological approach. Economic theories of federalism and innovation research in the social sciences help us to understand which aspects of economic or innovation theory can promote effectiveness in this respect. It is necessary to interpret the distribution of competences in a dynamic way, thereby slightly shifting the limits of interpretation.

This article theorizes the Zimbabwean writer Stanlake Samkange’s turn from the novel to philosophy as an effort to circumvent the representational pressure exerted by African cultural traumatization. In breaking with the novel form to coauthor a philosophical treatise called Hunhuism or Ubuntuism in the same year as Zimbabwe achieves independence (1980), Samkange advances a comportment-based, deontological alternative to the psychic or subjective model of personhood that anchors trauma theory. Revisiting the progression from his most achieved novel, The Mourned One, to Hunhuism or Ubuntuism thus offers fresh insight into the range of options available to independence-era writers for representing the relationship between African individuality and collectivity. At the same time, it suggests a complementary and overlooked relationship between novelistic and philosophical forms in an African context.

I hypothesize that tragedy is the genre best suited to represent climate catastrophe. Tragedy, I contend, is committed to diagnosing the ideological and material conditions that make for mass, undeserved suffering—conditions of colonization and racialization, for instance, in Greek and modern drama and in modern tragic fiction. Not only does tragedy reveal injurious forms of power, it stages or incites rebellious collective action against them. These features of literary tragedy, I suggest, are non-Aristotelian. Aristotle lodges the source of crisis in individuals, who inadvertently cause their own misfortunes and suffer from them. The literary tragedy that I theorize, however, locates the origins of communal suffering in external agents of death and domination.

This invited commentary explores the ecological fretwork binding people and nature, and, specifically, how Italy and Italianness serve as critical frames for envisioning an environmental history of migration. It examines how each contribution in this special issue adds rigorous archival research to the growing body of academic literature on Italy and the environmental humanities. It also comments on the future research directions, which are connected to this emerging history. Situating these contributions in the wider context of climate change and planetary transformation, this article illuminates how mobilities, understood as an Italian phenomenon, have shaped the globe on a scale previously unknown.

This article examines the aesthetics of representing female sexuality within colonial narratives of the West–East encounter. I consider two literary works whose female characters challenge the gendered metaphors of empire that predominated in a tradition of colonial literature and its postcolonial rewriting: the short story “La femme adultère” by the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, and the novel Wāḥat al-ghurūb by Egyptian writer Bahāʾ Ṭāhir. In each text, the standard heterosexual troping of imperial conquest as a male activity directed at or against a feminized other is inverted to place a European woman’s sexually aroused body at the center of the drama of colonial contact. Reading these two texts against the grain of the aesthetic formulas that they employ to contemplate the political stakes of cross-cultural intimacies in a colonial setting, I argue that the phenomenological immediacy of how the female protagonist in each is shown to experience the eroticism of colonial space introduces a break in these formulas. The loss of narrative plausibility in each text that follows from these erotic interludes, I propose, ultimately testifies to the irreducibility of the body to either enforcing or disputing the epistemologies of the colonial project.