The magazine Renacimiento was one of the most important periodical publications in the evangelical world during the first decades of the twentieth century. Founded in 1921 by missionary Juan Ritchie, it became the voice of the Peruvian Evangelical Church (Iglesia Evangélica Peruana – IEP), the first national denomination in Peru. The magazine was part of initial efforts to develop Protestant journalistic work, in which other Protestant missionary agencies also participated. However, the influence of the Renacimiento was decisive in creating a Protestant consciousness and developing reactions to various social and religious topics based in a nascent evangelical identity. This chapter will focus on selections from the first years of the magazine (1921–1930), paying close attention to the political and social dimensions of faith in its articles as well as the construction of evangelical identity. Its aim is to contribute to our understanding of this crucial period of evangelical history by analyzing a forum in which the voices of missionaries and national leaders converged.

This chapter highlights the relationship between celebrity, sexual identity, and a star’s “authenticity” in gay celebrity autobiography. Authenticity is achieved in celebrity autobiographies when the reader perceives they are receiving personal information about a star or, ideally, that the star is participating in this revelation of private details. For gay celebrities, this personal information includes a recounting of the star’s coming out as gay. Coming out is performative and personal; it establishes intimacy with the reader and adheres to expectations for a celebrity’s media-mediated “revelation.” The coming-out story establishes the gay celebrity as vulnerable and relatable to gay readers and allows heterosexual readers to connect to gay subject matter through the revelatory nature of confession. The autobiographical form gives the celebrity control over the coming-out story as he “outs” himself, earmarking the “revelation” as the star “being himself” for his readers, giving them an exclusive that exists outside of the hollow construct of fame. Gay celebrity autobiography represents an inclusive visibility for both the writer and the reader even as the confessional space of the autobiography itself may also be an illusion in which truth and authenticity are queered through the form of the autobiography itself.

This chapter focuses on two major axes of social identity in India: caste and tribe. It provides an overview of the two categories, in particular focusing on how the categories are identified and measured in national-level macro data. It summarizes key features of contemporary economic disparities along these two dimensions. The chapter discusses the overlap between caste/tribal status and religion and provides a summary overview of the racial theory of caste. Tribe as a category has specific dimensions that are distinct from the caste system. The chapter reviews these and moves on to a discussion of the intersection of caste/tribe category with sex. The evidence in the chapter suggests that caste and tribe continue to define socio-economic status in contemporary India. India’s affirmative-action policies addressing caste, tribe and gender disparities are necessary, but not sufficient, to lower the influence of the lottery of birth on individual outcomes.

The autobiographical act of coming out was one of the central gestures of US gay liberation. In the late 1960s and 1970s coming out was part of a new defiant way of living homosexuality and promised to transform the social world by showing how gay people were everywhere. Yet, in the period since this time, coming out has tended to be viewed much more suspiciously. For queer theory, coming out is associated with a naïve belief in subjective coherence, stable identity, and liberal personhood, all constructed or produced on the basis of suppressing both social and psychic difference. This chapter challenges this established perspective by foregrounding the wide variety of autobiographical writings in which gay men came out in this period. Far from a step into straightforward coherence, finding identity in these texts is often a fractured and fraught undertaking. The chapter covers a wide range of material, from single-author autobiographies published by mainstream presses to numerous anthologies published by grassroots initiatives. The sheer variety of texts addressed further challenges the singular narrative about coming out that has become established within queer scholarship.

The Hungarian political system after the regime change has become extremely polarised and deep political fault lines have developed between the domestic political communities. It has been investigated in this chapter how hatred and the resulting violence (verbal and non-verbal) and its post-2010 constitutional representation have become one of the main structuring factors of the domestic political and social space in such a way that asymmetric counter concepts have become dominant in the identification war between opposing political sides: this means that almost all possibilities for dialogue between opposing positions have been lost, because the definition and domination of the identity of the other has become the main aspect. This paper argues that similar processes of attribution and identification have been taking place in the refugee crisis since 2015, and this time the hatred has been directed towards the ‘political other’, only to return to the domestic political scene and further deepen the dichotomies that have become familiar since the regime change. The post-2010 constitution-making process elevated this hostility to the level of the Fundamental Law and created a system of Constitutionalised Image of Enemy (CIE), the analysis of CIE is the main undertaking of this chapter.

Whereas the rest of the book explains the remarkable discursive silence on homosexuality in Belgium compared to neighboring countries, this first chapter shows how a lively queer subculture thrived regardless in Brussels during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. It demonstrates how rapid urbanization and its modern infrastructure facilitated homosexual encounters. The Belgian capital was more representative of urban growth in Europe than were megacities such as Paris or London. In Brussels too, wage labor, migration, and mass transport fueled a bachelor culture that enabled nontraditional lifestyles, and since no laws explicitly forbade same-sex acts between consenting adults in private, foreigners from Britain, Germany, and elsewhere found opportunities in Belgium not open to them at home. In several ways, then, the country’s comparative silence on homosexuality enabled rather than precluded queer possibilities.

The final chapter focuses on the only Belgian who briefly pierced his country’s silence on sexual ‘inversion’ during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. In 1899, the internationally acclaimed author Georges Eekhoud published the most daring queer novel of the period. A charge of indecency against his explicitly homoerotic and class-transcending love story caused an uproar among Europe’s literary community. Celebrity authors, including Émile Zola, collectively screamed blue murder over this attempt to curtail the hallowed freedom of artistic expression. The trial that followed ended in triumph and Eekhoud seemed poised to become a standard-bearer of the budding transnational movement for homosexual rights. But at home, Eekhoud soon grew isolated and unhappy as leftists and artists alike shunned him for his association with such an odious issue. While the writer’s autobiographical writings and private diary offer a rich insight into the way sexology shaped his sexual sense of self, they also reveal how Belgium’s stifling culture of bourgeois respectability still buried homosexuality in shame during the early twentieth century, while Eekhoud’s Dutch and German allies were already pushing the matter successfully onto the public agenda.

At the conclusion of the war, Major General Roy Burston, the Army Director General of Medical Services and Chair of the national VAD Council, wrote, ‘The past seven years have brought about a complete change in our attitude towards the employment of women in the armed forces.’ Throughout the war Burston supported the employment and development of VAs and then the AAMWS in the military. Their indispensability had been recognised. Yet, with the end of the war, AAMWS were discharged and Burston’s suggestion to maintain a cohort of women ready to serve in the event of a future war was, as he wrote: ‘…that the [civilian] VADs provide an organisation under which this training could be most effectively carried out in peace time. In addition, it is felt that there would be many advantages in maintaining the [civilian] VADs with their tradition of service which has been built up over the past 30 years or more.’ The war had provided an environment for women to expand their job opportunities, and it gave servicewomen space in the military to demonstrate the value not only of historically female dominated duties but of women’s labour generally. But the end of the war effectively erased this recognition.

The wartime priorities for Australia shifted during the summer of 1941–42 as tensions in the Pacific increased, with Japan and the United States entering and quickly mobilising for war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. With the sinking of the HMAS Sydney off the West Australian coast in November 1941, Australia’s concern for the Indo-Pacific was already mounting. When Singapore then fell to the Japanese on 15 February 1942, and with it 18 000 Australian troops captured, Australia felt the situation worsening. With the first bombing of Darwin in February 1942, soon after the fall of Singapore, war had reached the nation’s shores, and the threat of invasion became immediate. Australia then withdrew its troops from the Middle East, where the majority had been serving, and the defence of its own territory dominated the nation’s consciousness. This sparked a change in attitude for Australia which caused a rapid growth in service enlistments, including with both the civilian and Army VAD organisations.

Focusing on (auto)biographical modes of life-writing and how they engage with risky masquerade, Chapter 2 examines writings of avant-garde French writers Michel Leiris and Antonin Artaud, both dissident French Surrealists who took enormous interest and personal risks in exploring all forms of alterity. The chapter starts with Leiris’s writing on spirit possession in L’Afrique fantôme (1934). Leiris equates autobiography with ‘la tauromachie’ (‘bullfighting’), positing it as a deadly contest between the self as subject and self as object of writing. This notion is repeated and transformed by malleable bodies exemplified by the notorious Roman emperor Heliogabalus in Artaud’s hagiographical text Héliogabale (1934), who demonstrates the plasticity – namely, the capacity for transformation – of masquerade. Read together, Leiris and Artaud establish the masquerader as a recurrent figure in life-writing that generates a potentially infinite chain of mimeses. Through the figure of the masquerader as risk-taker and role-player, which also extends into Chapter 3, this chapter proposes the critical method of chain comparison.

This chapter outlines distinctions between national and nationalist uses of folk music as a frame for discussing its slipperiness as a concept and the political and identitarian implications of its performance, its collection and publication, its use in education and in religion, and its adoption into works of art music. Consideration of folk practices in Britain, France, Spain, and the USA from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries is combined with special attention to expressions of Celtic otherness within nation states. The chapter also addresses the manner in which sub-national musical nationalisms (or ethnic nationalisms), operate as positive symbols of subaltern resistance and celebration when folk or folk-like material is imported into the art music of late nineteenth-century concert halls. At the same time, the chapter addresses the ‘primitivism’ of folk music and the connections nineteenth-century thinkers made between national folk musics and the precepts of social Darwinism.

In this chapter, legendary artist Peggy Seeger draws together, in characteristically virtuosic fashion, the themes of this book as a whole through the trio of song, singer, and community. Communities, she argues, are the social soil upon which human cultures germinate. They breed and support singers who make, sing, and pass on songs, which in turn act as a group glue, thus creating new communities. She portrays herself as a ‘song-carrier’ and a storyteller, pointing out that folk songs provide us with great templates – opportunities for everyone to narrate their own story in their own way.

This chapter explores the life, conversion, and enduring intellectual impact of Paul of Tarsus, the pivotal figure who redefined the meaning of Christ’s message and helped establish Christianity’s universal reach. Drawing on the Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s authentic letters, the chapter recounts Paul’s transformation from persecutor of Christians to their foremost theologian. Key themes include martyrdom (via the stoning of Stephen), Paul’s “vessel of election” status, and his mission to the Gentiles. Special attention is paid to Paul’s rhetorical engagement with Greco-Roman audiences, particularly his speech at the Areopagus in Athens, where he engaged Epicurean and Stoic thought. The chapter also analyzes major theological ideas from his letters – radical equality in Galatians, divine election in Romans, and the centrality of charity (agapē) and the resurrection in 1 Corinthians. Paul’s integration of Platonic and Aristotelian themes into Christian doctrine, especially in his vision of the resurrection and the soul-body union, helped shape the metaphysical and moral architecture of Christian – and western – thought. The chapter concludes by noting Paul’s legacy as a thinker who merged personal transformation with expansive theological vision.

A key challenge for the party since 1949 has been to forge a new Chinese nation within the boundaries of a vast, ethnically heterogeneous former empire. The party has experimented with a variety of policies and mechanisms for securing the loyalty and obedience of non-Han groups, shifting between accommodative and assimilative approaches depending on the broader political climate at any given time. Frustrated by continued ethnic unrest, which the party sees as a threat to social stability and its political legitimacy, the party has, in recent years, sought to fortify the unity of the nationalities via increasingly coercive administrative and technological measures. This chapter examines the coercive measures implemented by the CPC to guide and control China’s minority nationalities. These include controls over religion, language, traditional practices, minority nationality regions, and minority nationalities who ventured to other parts of China. The controls are designed to prevent ethnic protest and to forge a common Chinese ethnic identity that subsumes all other ethnic identities and which is united by loyalty to the party-state.