While many scholars have explored the ways in which “Africa” functions as a potent, living memory that animates August Wilson’s characters and audiences, this chapter suggests it is time to raise new questions about Wilson’s representation of Africa in his dramaturgy. In particular, it argues that Wilson’s American Century Cycle has projected an “Africa” not contemporaneous with African America. Indeed, this “Africa” stands outside of historical time. Accordingly, it is time for us to raise a new line of critical inquiry: What are the implications of such an ahistorical representation?

The issue of whether technology is inherently motivating for learners and teachers has often been discussed in the literature around computers and language learning. Yet, there is more to this relationship than initially meets the eye. This chapter outlines the ways in which symbolic power plays a part in both personal and institutional motivations for the adoption of technology. The chapter also looks at the way motivation is often credited as a key to success, though rarely with much empirical evidence. Finally, the article takes on a practitioner’s viewpoint to share several motivational techniques that can assist with practice and research.

Literacy is the ability to make use of visible language, and it is fundamental to language education. This chapter focuses on what teachers should know about digital technologies but begins with broad background and context related to multiliteracies, metaphors, and cultural dimensions of technology use. It then focuses on four key areas where teachers play an important role in the development of their students’ language and literacy abilities via technology: autonomy, mobility, creativity, and communities. It then discusses two controversial areas of current pedagogical research and practice: artificial intelligence and machine translation. It concludes with a call for greater attention to two additional areas highly relevant to language development: literacies related to film and digital communication in the context of study abroad.

Achieving “living space” for the German people was one of Hitler’s central aims. The concept was developed in the late nineteenth century and popularized in the 1920s after Germany lost territory at the end of the First World War. Hitler saw the concept as essential for the survival of the German people. The object was not just space, but imperial space that could be exploited for resources and whose population would serve German needs. This “greater economic area” was to be self-sufficient (autarkic) as far as possible, creating a German-centered economic bloc to reflect what some German economists assumed was the way the world economy was developing. The war against the Soviet Union was intended to complete this program of imperial expansion and provide room for the surplus German population as well as generous supplies of food and raw materials.

This chapter focuses on policies of the Allies from 1941 until 1945. Responding to the news about the mass extermination of the Jews, individuals and Jewish organizations lobbied for making declarations denouncing Nazi atrocities and taking diplomatic and political measures. This chapter shows the complexity of Allied attitudes, logistical and political considerations, actions, and inactions with regard to the fate of the Jews in Europe. In particular, it concerns the response to the destruction of Hungarian Jewry, the rescue initiatives and role of Roul Wallenberg, and the refusal to bomb Auschwitz.

This chapter examines Nazi policies that sought to “weed out” members of the population based on racial criteria (primarily targeting persons whom the Nazis classified as Jews, Sinti, or Roma), eugenic criteria (targeting individuals labeled as suffering from genetic diseases), or the criterion of deviance (targeting those whose deviance from social or sexual norms supposedly revealed their biological inferiority). The chapter argues that Nazi biopolitics was a contentious arena in which rivaling Nazi Party, state, and SS agencies competed for influence. This argument is developed by investigating three topics: Nazi sterilization policy; a protracted 1933−5 conflict between two competing racial theories and the impact of the conflict’s outcome on the drafting of racial legislation that culminated in the 1935 Nuremberg laws; and the 1937−8 turn to a biopolitical policy of “preventive detention” in concentration camps, on the orders of the police, which centralized efforts to round up “Asoziale,” a category that included beggars, vagrants, homeless persons, prostitutes, and potentially anyone exhibiting behavior considered socially deviant.