Drawing extensively on his years in Paris both before and after his enforced flight from Havana in 1928, Carpentier’s early music criticism up to 1939 not only sought to stimulate debate among the Cuban vanguardia and raise awareness of repertoire then still largely unknown in Havana but also represents a narrative for his own aesthetic advocacies in his quest to establish a unique sense of Cubanidad. Far from mere journalism, Carpentier’s music criticism constitutes a workshop of ideas that nourished his literary trajectory, while also proposing European modernism as a potent model for establishing a distinctively Latin American identity. This essay explores these ideas, demonstrating how Carpentier aimed to counter the entrenched conservativism of contemporary concert life in Havana, at the same time shedding valuable light on the activities of the Parisian avant-garde and his unique position as both creative participant and critical observer.

This chapter explores underlying links between Carpentier’s life and works. It points out that because of his asthma, the boy did not receive a systematic education but read a lot. The phases of his longer apprenticeship can be divided in two, his years in Cuba, and then the years spent in Paris. While Carpentier distanced himself from socialist realism at the time, he committed himself to the defense of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. There is no doubt that as the youngest member of the Minorista generation of Cuban intellectuals, Carpentier worked consistently towards artistic, social, linguistic and political transformation.

When considering the importance of France in Neruda’s life and works, scholars have chronicled up to nine separate visits, from the anecdotes of amorous adventures to a desperate search for political asylum, friendships and romances, forged and dissolved. This chapter studies the importance of France and its impact on the evolution of Neruda’s artistic values and production through the literary lens of key poems associated with five particular visits to France. Among other poems related to Neruda’s stay in France, this chapter focuses on references to Picasso in Las uvas y el viento (The Grapes and the Wind, 1952) and their collaboration in Toros (Bulls, 1960), where they express their shared love for and faith in Spain.

In the mid-nineteenth century, opéra de salon dominated residential entertainment in Parisian salons. As these short, comedic operas were adapted for household receptions, librettists and composers faced a choice: adhere to staging conventions or adapt their works to fit the idiosyncrasies of residential space. Focusing on the salon of Anne Gabrielle Orfila, who was a proponent of opéra de salon and who hosted at least ten unique productions, this study examines how opera was adapted to salon space. It shows how stage action was not always contained by a single room, with scenes often spanning adjacent rooms. This affected audience seating and shaped the dramatic experience. The study also considers the significance of salon décor as it harmonized with or competed with the opera scenery. At a time when spectacle and elaborate designs prevailed at the Paris Opéra, opéra de salon presented a contrasting model that challenged theatrical conventions.

This chapter traces the emergence of a North African critique of Arab nationalism and its project for the Arab Renaissance in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab defeat. It takes up the journeys of intellectuals Moroccan Abdallah Laroui and Tunisian Hichem Djaït and how they challenged the dominant frameworks of Arab nationalism and pan-Arab unity at the 1970 Louvain Conference on the Arab renaissance. The two critiqued both the ideological uses of history by the national project and the epistemological structures of Orientalist scholarship, which they accused of perpetuating a discourse of Arab cultural crisis and decadence. This chapter then traces their engagements with figures such as Gustav von Grunebaum, Louis Massignon, and Jacques Berque in the publishing landscape of Parisian orientalism. As such, these two examples illustrate a new position in Arab thought, which believed in the imperative of reclaiming historical thinking as a tool for intellectual decolonization. In charting these entanglements, this chapter sheds light on the continued ties between North Africa, the Arab East, and Parisian Orientalism, and the debate on cultural authenticity and Arab modernity.

This chapter demostrates with town council deliberations and records from other local assemblies that political discourse and complaints at the very local level mirrored those in bailiwick assemblies , provincial estates, and meetings of the Estates General, and they reliably reflect public opinion. It shows that national complaints came from the bottom-up, both in rural as well as urban areas.

The 1973 Paris Accords provided only a temporary respite from the war. As the war between the Vietnamese continued, antiwar forces focused initially on carrying out the agreement, then on ending US military and financial support for the Thieu regime. The Watergate scandal undermined the final obstacle to ending America’s commitment. The war’s 1975 conclusion brought more relief than excitement.

Chapter 9 investigates the unprecedented flooding of the Seine and Marne rivers in June 2016. Focussing on the core of Île-de-France, managed by SIAAP, the chapter assesses the flood’s impact on the sanitation system and subsequent effects on the quality of the Seine and Marne rivers. Drawing data from sanitation departments and SIAAP, it details the hydrographic network, rainfall and hydrological situations. The study evaluates the sanitation system’s operation, discharged volumes, sewage treatment plants and environmental impacts, emphasising water quality parameters such as nitrogen, orthophosphates, dissolved oxygen and bacteriology. Despite challenges, the assessment highlights effective management, treatment system performance and the importance of real-time control systems, providing insights for future flood response and urban sanitation planning.

Farrenc worked within a network of musicians devoted to chamber music, including a dozen or more women pianists who specialized in the Classical repertoire. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, violinists like Pierre Baillot and Jean-Delphin Alard established chamber music concerts that created a culture of enthusiasm for string quartets and quintets, piano trios, and large ensemble music. Pianists like Farrenc, Thérèse Wartel, Sophie Pierson-Bodin, and Clara Loveday specialized in the performance of chamber music in the 1830s–50s, which allowed them to establish professional careers within a social environment that placed strict limits on “respectable” women and their activities in public spaces. Wartel established the Society for Classical Music, which presented septets, octets, and nonets for winds and strings to the Paris public for the first time. Farrenc composed her Nonet for the members of this group of virtuoso wind and string players, who performed it together in her solo concert in 1850.

Louise Farrenc grew up in Paris during the Revolutionary period that saw the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte and of different monarchies in France. These political changes impacted the Parisian musical scene and influenced Farrenc’s career and that of her friends and colleagues. Farrenc began her career as a virtuoso pianist-composer writing popular works like sets of variations on opera melodies and folksongs, but at the end of the 1830s, she changed her musical path. In the 1840s, like many composers in Central Europe at the time, she abandoned the virtuoso music of her youth to write chamber music with and without piano as well as three symphonies. She became known as a composer of serious music, an upholder of “German” traditions in France, and critics wrote about her compositions as representing the best new music of France. Her Nonet for Winds and Strings provides a culmination of the work she had done up to that point as a composer and performer devoted to finding a “middle way” between the Classical and Romantic traditions.

Foreignness is generally viewed as a liability for the multinational enterprise, negatively affecting strategic fit and the successful transfer of firm assets abroad. Using semiotics – the study of how language systems convey meaning – and the Walt Disney Company’s experiences in internationalization, this chapter provides an illustrative example of a focal transcultural ethnography which develops the notion of semantic fit as a necessary complement to strategic fit and formalizes a conceptual model of recontextualization – the process by which firm assets take on new meanings in distinct cultural environments.

This chapter follows Hemingway from his journalistic work in the early 1920s through the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926. Ambitious to write fiction that would be innovative and popular, Hemingway absorbed the influences of Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others as he adapted news stories into sketches and wrote short stories based on combat experience and on his youth. Hemingway’s early style grew in the rich soil of literary experimentation in Paris in the 1920s, where he encountered an international literary and artistic avant-garde. This earliest work exemplifies Hemingway’s experimentation and its relationship to his deep need to express the apparently inexpressible contents of his psyche and experience. The reception of his 1925 story collection In Our Time established his early reputation. This chapter’s reading of The Sun Also Rises emphasizes Hemingway’s ironic deployment of both received narrative conventions and religiously significant pilgrimage and ritual themes, which locates Hemingway in a crucial vein of literary modernism exemplified by Eliot’s The Waste Land. Like these other modernist works, Hemingway’s novel is immured in the social attitudes within which he worked; anti-Semitism, racism, and homophobia tangle the novel’s surface texture but also shape its narrative structures.

In this introduction, we first describe the contents of the Summa Logicae in some detail, situating the work in the larger context of medieval logical texts of the thirteen and fourteenth centuries and explaining why it occupies pride of place in Ockham’s philosophical project. Second, we argue that the Summa Logicae was most likely composed in Avignon between 1324 and 1328 contrary to the accepted view that Ockham wrote it in London over the summer of 1323. Third, we trace the legacy of the Summa Logicae from its first reception in Oxford and Paris in the 1330s, into the Parisian controversies of the 1330s and 1340s, and its dissemination further into Europe over the course of the next century or so. We end this history by noting the 1974 publication of the modern critical edition of the Summa Logicae, which was an enormously significant landmark in Ockham studies.

This essay details selected experiences from Fornés’s early life that were formative to her philosophy of life and art in order to highlight how her theatremaking relates to and extends from Havana’s vanguard movements of the 1920s–1940s. Considering Fornés’s migration alongside the trajectories of transnational movement of artists like director Francisco Morín and composer Mario Bauzá, Mayer-García evinces how this experience disposed her to approaching the world through “errant thinking” wherein one comes to know oneself through an immersion in foreign lands and cultures. By highlighting connections with some of Cuba’s most notable artists, the author argues that shared mobility, portable affects of place, and errant thinking all implicate Fornés as a displaced artist from Havana’s avant-garde circles.

Elaine Romero – an accomplished playwright, teacher, and yogi who studied all three practices with María Irene Fornés – uses the tools of dramatic writing to develop a historically informed theatrical exploration of Fornés’s time in Paris in 1954 with her then romantic partner, Harriet Sohmers (an artist, model, and writer who later published memoirs of this period using the surname Zwerling). Here, Romero’s short play – set in the summer of 1954 that the two women spent together in Paris – ruminates on how Fornés’s artistic beginnings stirred during this intimate time with Sohmers. The playscript is prefaced by a brief critical reflection by Romero that details how her own experiences with Fornés inflect her playwriting process and the playwriting exercise Romero offers as conclusion to her play.

Considering the life and influence of María Irene Fornés’s mother on her development, education, and theatrical career. This chapter follows the life of Cuban teacher, mother, and widow, Carmen Collado Fornés, who moved with her two daughters, María Irene and Margarita, to New York City in 1945, and lived with María Irene until her death in 1996. Key aspects of this chapter include Carmen Fornés’s vocation as a teacher, her influence on her daughter, and how María Irene’s role as caretaker informed her work as a theater artist and teacher.

George Benjamin recalls his friendship with Pierre Boulez which lasted over thirty-five years. He pays homage to Boulez’s quite extraordinary musical abilities and remembers the exceptional lucidity and brilliance of his mind.

The history of the relationship between Sean O’Casey and the French stage is closely linked to the history of décentralisation, the state-implemented policy of creating a network of subsidised theatres outside Paris initiated after World War II during the Fourth Republic. His plays were staged regularly in French public theatres until the early 1980s, when the generation of theatre practitioners who had implemented décentralisation began to retire. This chapter starts by giving some contextual elements about décentralisation; it then moves on to give a brief account of some particularly significant O’Casey productions, in chronological order.