This Introduction provides a condensed telling of five hundred years of Romani history within an Atlantic context. It illustrates that Romani people have been part of the modern Atlantic world and that the Atlantic world has shaped the Romani diaspora and Romani people’s sense of who they are. Stories of Atlantic circulations, interactions, connections and exchanges show how Romani people and ideas held about them, transcended empires, nations and borders. The Introduction specifically contextualizes three moments of visibility. During the early modern era, Romani people experienced (often forced) population movements as part of imperial expansions and prompted the translation of European antigypsyism in the context of colonialism, slavery, capitalism, Indigenous genocides and emerging racial thought. At the turn of the twentieth century, nationalistic immigration controls provoked a heightened recognition of Romani people that impacted their experiences, forms of sociability and strategies of mobility. After World War II, as transnational migrants and refugees, they garnered new attention and built diasporic communities in the face of novel and changing international circumstances. Adding Romani people to Atlantic history allows us to think differently about the Atlantic world and transforms our understanding of Romani lived experiences.

The introduction provides a condensed historical sketch of poetry in Ireland that might be helpful to readers and elaborates the major conceptual underpinnings and thematic nodes that run through the volume.

The filid were crucial and complex figures in early Irish culture. Usually appointed by a king or noble lord, they held a central position within a túath; they were esteemed and feared because of their powers of bestowing praise or laying blame; along with the brithem and senchaid [judges and historians], they preserved and curated historical lore, genealogical information, and legal knowledge; they undertook long periods of study and existed within a finely articulated hierarchy in which particular fees, honor-prices, repertoires, and meters were proper to certain ranks of poets arrayed below the ollam, the chief-poet; and they were traditionally accorded various powers (to charm, to curse, to incant). Mediating figures between the early Christian church and native culture (and deriving in uncertain ways from the Celtic druid, a topic of long debate), filid were embedded in noble houses and, later, monasteries, and were highly regarded; this chapter provides an account of the roles, duties, and orders of poets in early and medieval Ireland

This chapter examines a remarkable effort to memorialize ‘Alamgir in the decades after his death. This enterprise is noteworthy because it was unprecedented in Mughal history: no other emperor, not even ‘Alamgir’s much-admired great-grandfather Akbar (r. 1556–1605), was eulogized with the same intensity and for so many decades after his death. In its early stages this project was led by a small group of noble ‘Alamgir loyalists. In time, however, the effort extended to other parts of the rapidly disintegrating empire as well as, unexpectedly, to groups that had either been only nominally under Mughal rule or had actively opposed it. The end product was a trove of histories, administrative manuals, collections of orders and correspondence, and miniatures depicting ‘Alamgir. Although the participants’ motivations for eulogizing ‘Alamgir varied, the results point to a broad consensus about his greatness, among both Muslims and Hindus, across much of northern and central India that lasted until the late eighteenth century and the onset of British colonial rule.

This chapter offers a close reading of Chapter 5 of Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Its primary focus is the two new characters Heinrich meets: an old miner and a hermit. The miner embodies a poetic way of seeing nature as an interconnected whole that gives expression to the presence of the divine. The hermit embodies a poetic way of seeing history in a parallel way, in which past and future are joined together in a spiritual present. Heinrich witnesses how their conversation converges on poetry as the higher power that unites nature and history, giving him a first glimpse of his own vocation.

We trace the evolution of statistics from its origins in the seventeenth century, contrasting twentieth-century data sets and approaches with those seen frequently today. This discussion motivates the approach taken in the book, which focuses on the bias--variance tradeoff as opposed to unbiased estimation, and on finite-sample guarantees as opposed to asymptotics, which can often be misleading in problems whose difficulty is controlled by several parameters. We introduce the decision-theoretic framework that underpins our assessment of the performance of statistical procedures, and discuss the concepts of minimaxity and adaptation. One of our perspectives is to seek to understand the behaviour of methods with respect to as wide a class of data generating mechanisms as possible, and in particular under model misspecification --- where an idealised model that motivates a procedure fails to hold. We discuss the use of the book for teaching and prerequisites for students, concluding with notation used throughout the book.

Welcoming new teachers to the profession provides an important opportunity to build the foundations for professional growth, satisfaction, and positive impacts on students’ lives. Creating a meaningful dialogue and orientation helps new educators transition into their roles with confidence while developing a reflective, adaptive, and student-centred practice.

In his 1962 essay ‘Does Political Theory Still Exist?’, Berlin responded to the increasingly prevalent sense of anxiety relating to the alleged decline in the coherence and conviction of the subject. He pondered the notion that the contemporary emphasis on empirical inquiry into the actual mechanisms of politics might have undermined the continuing relevance of exploring and evaluating political ideas, and he also reflected on the issue of the extent to which, if at all, political philosophy could and should contain a normative import in its intentions and expressions. This chapter will place the piece in its proper historical, intellectual and institutional contexts, and explain the multiple reasons why Berlin, and many of his eminent contemporaries, had grown so concerned as to its current ‘shadowy existence’. The discussion will conclude by considering the degree of precision and power in Berlin’s defence of the ‘great tradition’ of political theory, rooted in ‘rational curiosity’, not only as a contribution to the most pertinent debates of his own time, but also as a point of reference and cue for reflection for those who remain invested in the activity, as a vocation and profession, in the political culture of today.

The introduction brings the reader into the world of seventeenth-century Ireland. It offers a brief overview of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially the legacies of rebellion and violence that were present at the opening of the study in 1603. It considers broadly English understandings of and policy towards Ireland across a wide timespan, before introducing some of the key differences that emerged in the early seventeenth century. It offers a survey of important historiography and a reflection on source materials, particularly the 1641 Depositions and associated materials, before concluding with an overview of the book’s structure.

Three questions have usually been asked about the French Revolution: why did it happen?; why was it so violent? and what was its legacy? At first sight all three questions seem to beg other, more conceptually ambitious questions, whether about causation, violence or legacies. The aim of this short book is to answer both sets of questions by bringing together events with ideas. Combining the two actually helps to make the answers to the second, more conceptually oriented set of questions more historically and analytically focussed. It does so because the French Revolution owes much of its complexity to ideas and, more particularly, to the range and multiplicity of appearances and temporalities that ideas can lend to events. Complexity, not only in France and not only at the time of the French Revolution, is more than an effect of large numbers of people living in different circumstances with different, sometimes antagonistic, interests. It is also an effect of the range of occasionally compelling, but occasionally competing, emotional responses, moral evaluations and causal assessments made by, or of, people living in similar circumstances with similar, overlapping or complementary interests.

Many of the more lurid predictions of the course of the French Revolution, such as the forecast of ‘torrents of blood’ made by Mably’s executors to Thomas Jefferson in 1791, or the warning about ‘fire and blood’ famously issued by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790, or the scenario set out much earlier by the comte de Guibert in 1772, now look quite prescient. Other predictions of revolution, however, simply failed to materialise. Two, in particular, slowly faded from the sequence of events that began to unfold in France between 1787 and 1789. One set of predictions was centred on opposition to the royal government by the French Parlements, while the other focussed on the idea of a patriot king. Despite their disappearance, however, both are still relevant to the sequence of events that gave rise to the French Revolution partly because they were canvassed very widely at its beginning, but mainly because they also throw real light on the tangle of different and often competing assessments or evaluations of social, economic, moral and political conditions in late-eighteenth-century France. To some, like Voltaire, France was significantly backward, or not modern enough. To others, however, France was far too modern and possibly at a tipping point. One looked forward to the future, while the other looked backwards to the past. Both, however, converged on finding fault with the present.

This chapter is a close examination of the politics of English in African literature, one that considers the language as an essential, but problematic part of the genealogy of imaginative writing in Africa. The chapter starts with a critical examination of the globalization of English and its expansive power in the postcolonial world. Why is it that of all the major languages of the world English has come to be celebrated as a tool of globalization, the conduit to modernity, modernization, and global citizenship? The chapter complicates the narrative of English as a hegemonic and compulsory system in modern culture by focusing on how, in the hands of formally colonized writers, it has been provincialized, relocated from its metropolitan centers, and turned into a force of imaginative works at odds with the dominant narrative of globalization. Using African examples, the chapter reflects on how a provincialized English has generated new modes of writing that challenge the traditional conception of English literary studies.

This chapter interrogates how shifting contexts profoundly impacted Ngugi’s notion of history and his overall vison. Over the years Ngugi’s oeuvre has largely betrayed the conviction that African writing could intervene in the continent’s historiographical pursuits, and also in the actual determination of historical experience. As a result of complications in context, one sees in Ngugi’s later writing an attempt to reinvent himself in the process of interpreting and reinterpreting a perennially confounding postcolonial world in which the writer has been hewn from his history by the realities of migration, exile and globalisation. His later work is characterised by self-reflexivity as he wrestles with and casts doubt on the nature of narratives, especially their position, role or intervention in Africa’s historiography in a context that continues to defy logic. The act of writing is problematised and depicted as emblematic of a contemporary world where the increasing fluidity and unreliable nature of narratives call into question the very notion of historiography. Overall, Ngugi’s later major writing emerges as an epic journey of loss of faith that simultaneously questions, indicts and deconstructs the act of writing in a world where history seems contrived, concocted, deliberately chaotic and even stranger than ever before.

This chapter provides an account of how literary criticism, especially the one associated with F. R. Leavis and the Cambridge school worked, or failed to work, in an African context and the role this critical tradition played in the mapping of African writing in the postcolonial period. Focusing on the critical work of Abiola Irele, perhaps the most dominant figure in African literary critical studies in the second half of the twentieth century, the chapter looks at how the use of African literature as a primary body of reference led to the questioning of the key concepts defining literary criticism including the notion of tradition, literary genealogies, and the relation between language and identity. The chapter explores how Irele, working within three distinct cultural formations, namely the English, the French, and the Yoruba, positioned literary criticism as both an affirmation of tradition and a critique of traditionalism. Tracing the evolution of Irele’s critical thinking as he moved from universities in West Africa to the United States, the chapter provides an account of the relation between criticism, institutions, and audiences.

This chapter is on novelistic discourses and the project of cultural translation in African literature from the perspective of Comparative Literature. The chapter begins with an analysis of debates on translation from both a linguistic and cultural perspective focusing on how, in comparative literature, debates about translation are caught in a conceptual impasse between critics who insist on the impossibility of translation and those who claim that nothing is untranslatable. The key argument in this chapter is that African literature in European languages complicates this division by calling into question the notion of an original or source language. In African fiction produced in the twentieth century, what appeared to be the source language was already a translation. More significantly, linguistic translation could not be separated from the project of cultural translation; in order for novels to perform significant cultural work, writers had to make African idioms and speech forms intelligible to outsiders without reaffirming the forms of colonial knowledge.

This chapter revolves around cultures of the novel: When, how, and why did the novel, a genre without deep roots in African cultures and literary traditions, come to occupy such a dominant role in African literary history? Arriving late in the colonial period, the novel created new parameters for the African imagination and provided an opening for thinking about colonial modernity and its postcolonial consequences. The chapter discusses how the social functions of the novel came to be defined by two ostensibly contradictory functions. Through the invocation of realism, the novel would be celebrated as the medium of representing what were assumed to be the realities of African history, life, and subjectivity deracinated by colonial violence or misrepresented by colonialist fiction and criticism. At the same time, romantic tropes would be deployed to imagine alternative worlds and to promote the ideals of decolonization. Realism and romance would be wedded to invent national communities as counterpoints to colonial domination.