This article develops a method of understanding concepts from the Parisian Surrealist movement in music using Poulenc's treatment of cadences and fifth relations as a case study. Although music was rejected by the group's figurehead André Breton as ‘the most profoundly confusing’ of all arts, many composers were keenly involved in Surrealist circles. Notably, Poulenc's acquaintance with major figures led him to set much of their literary work. But his engagement with their aesthetic principles extends deep into the musical form. After assessing Poulenc's flirtation with the movement's ideas, I ally William Caplin's codification of the cadence to the Surrealist objet trouvé. Combining Robert Hatten's musical ‘markedness’ and literary theorist Willard Bohn's model of Surrealism in art and literature, I explore how Poulenc's music engages with the Surrealist treatment of objects, automatism, and Apollinaire's ‘fantôme véritable’.

The verbal prefix out- in its scalar-comparative sense is among the most productive English locative prefixes. Although several authors make use of the construction as a test environment for verb classification, few studies have looked at its semantics in any depth. Moreover, previous work on this prefix relies on fairly small databases or self-generated data, and no reliable corpus-based investigations are available, calling into question the usefulness of present semantic analyses and the application of the construction as a test environment.

This study aims at remedying these shortcomings via presenting a database culled mostly from COCA and iWeb. Based on the analysis of the wide range of attestations in the database it is shown that existing generalizations and previous semantic analyses are wrong and that particular restrictions proposed in the literature are not borne out by the data. Several claims, including core features of the formalizations offered in the literature, have to be discarded. Furthermore, alleged base-restrictions on the input out- allows are shown to be far too restrictive. This holds for verbal as well as adjectival and nominal bases. It is shown that approaches that deny the existence of category-changing prefixes are misguided.

Overall, the construction is more flexible regarding possible interpretations and more promiscuous with respect to possible bases than previously thought. At the same time, the system is not unrestricted. Generalizing over the data, this article lays out the requirements and specific challenges any full formal account of out- will have to match.

This contribution takes the form of an uncommon case report. It discusses an action brought to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) before the final decision has been rendered. The author believes this is justified because the innovative character of the procedural and substantive reasoning of the application could be of interest to a wider public. This may be the case even if the CJEU eventually dismisses the action as being inadmissible, leaving the substantive questions undecided. The applicants in Carvalho and Others v. European Union claim that European Union (EU) law does not limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as strictly as is required by EU human rights and international law. The case note explains the parties in the case, the acts being challenged, the relief being sought, and the content and application of the relevant procedural and substantive law. The case is illustrative of the high barriers for direct access to the CJEU, and suggests how they might be overcome. It is also a laboratory for examining the interface of climate science, economics, and law. At this interface, available emissions budgets and the technical and economic feasibility of emissions reductions are calculated and made legally relevant. Carvalho is based on the applicants’ conviction that, where the EU assumes a regulatory competence such as that of GHG emissions reduction, it must exercise it in accordance with its human rights and international obligations.

In this article, I seek charitably to develop an argument suggested by Thaddeus Metz. This is an argument against the view that it is consistent to hold that, while our lives may have some meaningfulness even if there is no heavenly afterlife awaiting us, if there is such an afterlife, they are even more meaningful, because heaven adds a potential infinity of meaningfulness. Having developed this argument on Metz's behalf, I criticize it. I conclude that – while throwing out a number of interesting ideas and possibilities along the way – no argument along Metz's lines can finally reach the conclusion aimed for.

By investigating the place of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the cities of the Atlantic world, this article explores many of the themes of this Special Issue across empires, with an emphasis on the Americas in the late eighteenth century, the eve of abolition. The article finds that, in nearly every manual occupation, slaves were integrated with free laborers and, not infrequently, slaves who had reached the level of journeyman or master directed the work of free apprentices. The limited number of slave insurrections in cities may be explained by the fact that they often worked semi-independently, earning money to supplement the livelihood provided by the master, or sometimes almost entirely on their own. To them, city life offered advantages that would have been inconceivable for their rural counterparts, especially the scope of autonomy they enjoyed and the possibilities to secure manumission.

How did the abolition of slavery influence the relations between urban centres and rural areas? How did “new” French citizens experience access to the urban environment? Based on the archives of the correctional courts, this article focuses on how race and citizenship determined the accessibility of French colonial urban spaces and institutions after 1848. The abolition of slavery in the French Antilles on 27 April 1848 led to a modification of the legal and judicial systems: the changing legal status of former slaves gave them new opportunities to move around the colonies, at least on paper. In theory, after 1848, everyone should have had freedom of social and spatial mobility and access to the urban centres and their institutions; what happened in practice, however, still needs to be researched. This article shows that the abolition exacerbated two dynamics already at play since the beginning of the nineteenth century: the control of the population and the attraction of the urban environment for the elite. The plantation system in the mid-nineteenth century was suffering both economically and politically: the newly acquired freedom and possible migration of former slaves to the towns (Saint-Pierre and Fort-de-France in Martinique, Pointe-à-Pitre and Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe) threatened to destabilize the system of private justice as well as the economic apparatus. To counteract these legal changes, vagrancy laws were implemented to restrict citizens’ mobility while, at the same time, the white elite's discourse on urban spaces changed from them being seen as a hotbed for revolutionary ideas to representing a safe environment to which access needed to be restricted.

This article explores the nature and expansion of slavery in Benguela, in West Central Africa, during the nineteenth century, engaging with the scholarship on second slavery. Robert Palmer, Eric Hobsbawm, and Janet Polasky have framed the nineteenth century as the age of contagious liberty, yet, in Benguela, and elsewhere along the African coast, the institution of slavery expanded, in part to attend to the European and North American demand for natural resources. In the wake of the end of the slave trade, plantation slavery spread along the African coast to supply the growing demand in Europe and North America for cotton, sugar, and natural resources such as wax, ivory, rubber, and gum copal. In Portuguese territories in West Central Africa, slavery remained alive until 1869, when enslaved people were put into systems of apprenticeship very similar to labor regimes elsewhere in the Atlantic world. For the thousands of people who remained in captivity in Benguela, the nineteenth century continued to be a moment of oppression, forced labor, and extreme violence, not an age of abolition.

After the 1836 abolition of slave exports, local merchants and recently arrived immigrants from Portugal and Brazil set up plantations around Benguela making extensive use of unfree labor. In this article, I examine how abolition, colonialism, and economic exploitation were part of the same process in Benguela, which resulted in new zones of slavery responding to industrialization and market competition. Looking at individual cases, wherever possible, this study examines the kinds of activities enslaved people performed and the nature of slave labor. Moreover, it examines how free and enslaved people interacted and the differences that existed in terms of gender, analyzing the type of labor performed by enslaved men and women. And it questions the limitations of the “age of abolition”.

Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Minas Gerais was heavily reliant on its slave labor force and invested in the social order shaped by slavery. The main systematic challenge to slavery was discrete negotiations of manumission that resulted in the freedom of a few individual slaves. This practice fueled the expansion of a free population of African descendants, who congregated most visibly in the captaincy's urban centers. Through an examination of manumission stories from two African-descendant families in the towns of Sabará and São José, this article underscores the relevance of family ties and social networks to the pursuit and experience of freedom in the region. As slavery remained entrenched in Brazil, despite Atlantic abolitionist efforts elsewhere, urban families’ pursuit and negotiation of manumissions shaped a historical process that naturalized the idea and possibility of black freedom.