Studying the Ottoman subjects in eighteenth-century Vienna helps to understand better the process of integration of the different districts of the city in a fast-changing context, especially around its Danube port area. Despite the withdrawal of the Ottoman empire from central Europe after 1683, Ottomans were fully a part of the history of Vienna and their presence has to be explored within the specific urban dynamics of a city: the reconfiguration of its economic sectors and social places, the tensions at play between the socio-economic groups by which a city was made and the evolution of its urban planning. Focusing on the Ottoman merchants operating in Vienna allows us to identify and to analyse the workings of the port area of the fourth largest city in Europe and to explore the social spaces of Viennese markets, streets, courtyards and coffeehouses.

This paper relies on the narrative of a renowned historian of Qing law from China mainland who has been called by Hong Kong High Court in 2007, to witness as an expert in “Chinese customary law.” At the opening of the trial, he recognized one well-known and estimated colleague from Taiwan in the expert engaged by the other party. During one week, these two legal historians called up a vast array of knowledge in Chinese history, culture, and law, to ensure the triumph of their party. The contest opposed the representatives of two branches of a same lineage who claimed their right to manage the lineage common wealth. As both were collaterals with dubious link with the original lineage, experts engaged in sophisticated arguments to make their cause prevail. Successively were adduced lineage registers the tabooing of fathers and emperors' personal name in the Chinese tradition, the degree of kinships as represented by “mourning charts” included in the Qing penal code. Even though it was “privately settled” before any judicial decision, this case raises questions on the very nature of “Chinese customary law”, and the role of “cultural expertise” at Common law in a Chinese environment.

This article focuses on the collaboration between Colombian black accordionist Carmelo Torres, the most renown performer of accordion cumbia, and Bogotá-based band Los Toscos, a group of academically trained white-mestizo musicians. Considering Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos as representative of the current state of cumbia's global circulation and in dialogue with the growing corpus of scholarly works on the topic, this article traces how this collaboration has circulated on local, national, and transnational scales and theorizes the different discourses of music, race, and nation that emerge from it. Using recent critiques by thinkers of colour to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I propose the idea of the racial assemblage and put it in dialogue with contributions to critical geography by Michel-Rolph Trouillot as well as current music scholarship from Latin America and the global north to build a interdisciplinary study that thinks embodied musicking in place.