In 2012, the authors undertook a radiocarbon dating programme to explore the chronology of southern Iberian megalithic societies. Thirty new radiocarbon dates were obtained for two tholos-type tombs, Loma de Belmonte and Loma del Campo 2, and analysed within a Bayesian framework. Results are discussed in the context of the prehistoric societies of the region and four main conclusions were reached: i) in both tombs, mortuary activity started in the last century of the fourth millennium although with significant differences in their timespan; ii) funerary rituals ended in Loma de Belmonte at least five centuries later than in Loma del Campo 2; iii) the tholoi can be considered the most recent type of tomb compared to other megalithic monuments with mortuary activity beginning in the first centuries of the fourth millennium; iv) the largest and most prominent settlement of the region, Las Pilas, was closely associated with this funerary and sacred landscape.

The Covid-19 crisis that led to the loss of thousands of lives and initiated one of the most complex social and economic upheavals has also a created a window of reflection for health systems researchers to revisit our major concepts, frameworks, and underlying assumptions. This commentary reviews two literatures that remain rather separate: comparative health policy and global health. First, I examine whether convergence in circumstances brought about by the spread of Covid-19 creates opportunities for learning “about” as well as unpacking the motivations of policy actors and how they use the cross-national information. However, given the emphasis on national policy actors and processes, this literature may overlook the importance of global actors, institutions and ideas. Second, global health differentiates itself with an emphasis on multilateralism as a political positioning and its multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral approach. However, the global health field is also challenged to consider its mission, political standing on multilateralism, changing relationships between North and South and its commitment to multidisciplinary approach. I argue that health systems scholars should use the window of opportunity created by Covid-19 pandemic to reexamine their methodologies and rearticulate their positioning by acknowledging the voice and agency of the Global South.

The response to COVID-19 demonstrates an inclusive and dispersed form of global health security that is less reliant on the UN Security Council or the World Health Organization (WHO). While WHO remains central to fighting the pandemic, the dispersed global health security addressing the crisis is inclusive of the wider UN system, civil society, and epistemic communities in global health. As part of the special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay argues that instead of facing crisis or criticism like WHO, this inclusive and dispersed form of global health security provides mechanisms of resilience and support to the UN at the height of global political tensions surrounding COVID-19.

In a language, suffix cohesion refers to the fact that suffixed words behave phonologically as simple or complex units depending on the suffix they are built with. This article uncovers a previously undescribed pattern of suffix cohesion in French, where words suffixed with vowel- and glide-initial suffixes behave phonologically like simple units (e.g. fêtiez [fet-je] ‘you partied’) and words built with other consonant-initial suffixes behave phonologically like complex units (e.g. fêterez [fɛt-ʁe] ‘you will party’). The evidence comes from a reassessment of well-known data on [ə]–[ɛ] stem alternations and from an acoustic study of [e]–[ɛ] and [o]–[ɔ] alternations in suffixed words as pronounced by 10 speakers living in the Paris area. The suffix’s phonological shape is found to provide the best account of the data among a set of factors that have been argued to be relevant to suffix cohesion in other languages (in particular resyllabification). The French pattern has important theoretical implications for theories of suffix cohesion as it is not prosodically conditioned. An alternative analysis in terms of paradigm uniformity is proposed, where suffixed words are treated as complex units phonologically if the suffix’s phonological shape facilitates the perceptual recognition of the base corresponding to the suffixed word’s stem.

This article explores psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s ideas about play and “transitional space” or “potential space” in relation to reading, pedagogy, and the legacy of apartheid in South African universities. Following the work of Carol Long, who argues that “apartheid institutions can be understood as the opposite of transitional spaces,” the author draws on her experiences of teaching in the English Department of the University of the Western Cape to reflect on how pedagogy is shaped by institutional culture. The article focuses particularly on “close reading” in the South African university classroom and how a rigid understanding of it has sometimes closed and constrained the experience of reading for students in order to argue for a more open model of “close reading” that values the immersive and creative aspects of reading as well as the analytic, following Winnicott’s understanding of meaningful cultural experience as rooted in play.

Postcolonial literary scholars often write about challenging traditional canons and Enlightenment ideas, but that challenge too often remains at the level of content and of ideas. We also need practical change to the university classroom, our curriculum, our syllabi, our pedagogy. And we need to be in dialogue with our colleagues teaching British or American or European literature who also want to decolonize their classrooms. There need to be fora where we can discuss the questions and problems we face in our classrooms and the strategies we have developed in response. These papers arise from an ongoing collaboration across institutions to discuss what we as teachers of literature can do differently and better.

The push to sustain online learning platforms that have been established in the wake of Covid-19 at South African universities raises a number of concerns. Apart from highlighting the stark and ongoing social inequities in terms of access, the need to ensure that there is still scope in our teaching practice for affective and performative encounters has also been thrown into sharp relief. I draw on two teaching contexts, the one dealing with a literary text, and the other a live performance in order to explore the decolonial potential of affective encounters. In addition to illustrating the complex and unpredictable workings of affect in teaching contexts, I also hope to show how these two incidents offer insight into the interface between sensorial and cognitive knowledge in relation to both literary and performance texts. The aim is to demonstrate how student responses to affective encounters resonate with, rather than directly address, some of the “everyday” processes of decoloniality.

Is Shakespeare universal? Is Hamlet a “strong” text that generates the same interpretation across cultural space and time, or is it a malleable text whose meaning is contingent upon variables in the encounter between text and reader and the contexts of reading? These were the kinds of questions that my students and I addressed in several courses I taught on Shakespeare over the past four years. As one might expect, our answers differed. Here, I develop and refine the argument I made and, sometimes, made incoherently: universality, whether in a writer, a text, or in criticism “is neither natural nor self-evident.” Because part of my reason for turning to Shakespeare was my dissatisfaction with contrapuntal reading as a pedagogical strategy for cultivating a “critical understanding of imperialism” in students, I conclude that we can only achieve that goal if we deploy contrapuntal reading across the literary curriculum.

What does it mean to decolonize the literature classroom? This short paper is intended as a personal reflection on teaching as an engagement with the social forces that bring neocolonial relations into the classroom, drawing on my experience teaching literature and literary theory in South Africa and Canada. I explore the idea of decolonizing the classroom as the production of an “outside” that provides meaning for the classroom’s “inside.”