This chapter reconsiders the road novel, not as a genre of Americanness and the frontier West, but rather as the privileged genre of US hegemony. Specifically, the chapter argues that the road novel does important work in critically mapping the expanding and shifting commodity frontiers of US hegemony, but through the lens and ideologies of automobility and what Matthew Huber has identified as the petro-driven ‘American way of life.’ To illustrate these claims, “Oil, Commodity Frontiers and the Materials of the Road Novel” offers a brief survey of three emblematic road novels that emerged during crucial moments of capitalist transition within the arc of US hegemony: Jack Kerouac’s paradigmatic western road novel, On the Road (1956) and the petroization of American life, Iva Pekárková’s post-socialist transition road novel, Truck Stop Rainbows (1989), and Samantha Schweblin’s neo-developmentalist soya-frontier road novel, Fever Dreams (2017). Taken together, the chapter reads the road novel as following the arc of US hegemony.

Publicity politicians explored new media strategies. Rather than through traditional secret methods of managing the press, politicians now personally sought the limelight. A ‘will to publicity’ defined their politics: they published their political communications – seeking political legitimacy by showing the public how they handled political crises – and made political speeches that the press amplified internationally. A fiery speech that animated a local audience, however, risked upsetting a distant audience of newspaper readers the next day. Consequently, political aides intervened in speeches’ publication. Since politicians and the press considered speeches important political acts, they became crucial to exercising power in a mass mediated environment. Mediated speeches enabled politicians to connect with the people directly, bypassing parliament and bureaucracy. Developments in photography and film further enabled politicians to put their person at the centre of public attention. Sketches and cartoons of politicians had a longer history, but they could now be printed and distributed faster and on an industrial scale.

Chapter 5 deconstructs the Supreme Court’s Buchanan opinion by conceptualizing Rhetorical Neutrality as a central tenet of post-racial constitutionalism: how the Court ignores or obscures history (historical myth); defines discrimination so narrowly that it’s virtually impossible to prove (definitional myth); and rationalizes inequality as a natural outcome of a neutral system (rhetorical myth). The Court fixates on protecting private-property and contracts rights against new government regulations during the Lochner era and uses an impoverished reading of the Fourteenth Amendment to prohibit only expressly race-specific classifications of property regulation. The Court crossed the color line of the early 20th century to protect both Blacks and whites from racial zoning, a superficial victory for racial justice. The chapter explores how the Supreme Court’s narrow jurisprudence has played out in landmark land-use cases of the past 100+ years, sustaining structural inequality by advancing post-racial constitutionalism through ostensibly neutral rulings that perpetuate subordination. The chapter concludes with an analysis of current housing legislation and opinions on disparate impact.

This chapter introduces the merchants who are the principal focus of this study and the sources on which the study is based. It also forecasts the argument that will be made about the class identity these merchants fashioned.

This final chapter ties together the lessons gleaned from the preceding analyses of statutory and contractual reversion models to present broad principles for lawmakers to apply when considering implementing reversion mechanisms in their jurisdictions. These principles are pitched at a suitably abstract level, cognisant of the different issues faced across different creative markets and jurisdictions. They cover elements like protecting reversion mechanisms against subversion by rightsholders and ensuring reversion mechanisms are industry specific. We close the chapter, and the book, with a provocation as to what an effective reversion system might look like, drawn from Giblin’s prior work in ‘A New Copyright Bargain’ (2018).

Among the many transformations from the first to the third Critique, one concerns the role of imagination which is no longer connected to the problems of representation (Vorstellung) but with exhibition or presentation (Darstellung). The focus is no longer the reproduction in the mind of the appearances we experience, but reflection on the relation between the phenomenal and the noumenal levels. In § 59 of the third Critique, Kant speaks of a symbolic hypotyposis, that is, an exhibition on the part of imagination intended to prove the reality of our ideas. Indeed, subjectio ad aspectum and hypotyposis mean giving visibility to ideas. The fulcrum of the chapter will be an examination of how, in his understanding of the concept ‘symbol’ in KU, § 59, Kant retrieves the tradition of ancient rhetoric while he at the same time reverses its constitutive tenets. Imagination no longer has to do with the faculty for images, but with the exhibition of the supersensible in a sensible medium. Kant’s move prepares, but is essentially foreign to, the further development in German Romanticism that progressively makes symbol the equivalent of poetry and the coincidence of finite and infinite.

This chapter takes up a theme that has underlain all previous chapters: were these men capitalists or how are they positioned in the history of capitalism? It also explores the question of whether these merchants formed a class and, if so, in what sense. I argue that they did form a class based on their role in the economy, but that their identity was fashioned by drawing on other ideological registers as well. The complex “class identity” they constructed allowed them entry into their period’s moral economy. It also provided later merchants with a model that would enable a narrative about their own self-worth.

From the early twentieth century, African work was reshaped by the emergence of the Spiritual Baptist Faith. Chapter 9 focuses on border-crossing devotees who spread the new religion throughout several locales in the Eastern Caribbean, returning to Grenada with a reworked version of the Spiritual Baptist Faith marked by South Asian and non-Christian European characteristics. The incorporation of the Spiritual Baptist Faith into African work practice indicates some ways in which liberated African cultures were invigorated by African Caribbean practices.

Many eighteenth-century theorists of common law attributed its legitimacy in part to its connection to a particular location and history. However, as Britain incorporated Scotland and expanded its imperial reach abroad, British governors often attempted to carry common-law practices to new locations. In his fiction and nonfiction, Sir Walter Scott advocates maintaining Scotland’s common-law system but worries that the very cultural and legal distinctiveness he demands for Scotland prevents Scots from receiving justice under British law. Portraying the consequences of the Norman conquest in Ivanhoe (1819) and internal and external colonialism in Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), Scott demonstrates the difficulties of reconciling the role of custom in common law’s legitimacy with a centralizing imperial state. In both works, the victors’ biases toward their own law mean that history and historical fiction no longer suture past and present, and that law imposes tragedy as well as order.

Post-genocide Rwanda serves as a case of strong institutional control in which the government engages transitional justice through a strategy of coercion. In this chapter I explore the Rwandan government’s response to international pressure for accountability. To advance government impunity, the government adopts a strategy of coercion, wherein a new transitional justice institution, gacaca, is implemented but subsequently monitored and controlled to advance state impunity and consolidate RPF control. The chapter begins with an overview of armed conflict in Rwanda with particular attention on the complexities of the violence experienced by individuals during the civil war, genocide, and at the hands of the RPF. I then discuss the government’s strategic adaptation of transitional justice to identify and evaluate the coercive strategy in which claims for government accountability are monitored and controlled. I explore the strategy of coercion in practice through an in-depth analysis of gacaca, which has aggressively pursued crimes of genocide while ignoring RPF abuses. To explore the coercion strategy beyond the case of Rwanda, I examine transitional justice in Burundi.

This chapter examines the literary registration of the life- and environment-making dynamics of commodity frontiers. It focuses on fictional representations of the contemporary soy frontier in Argentina and the former coal-mining districts of North East England. Specifically, the chapter considers Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate (Fever Dream, 2014), described by the author as Argentina’s first glyphosate novel, alongside Benjamin Myer’s Pig Iron (2012), which registers the socioecological fallout from the collapse of the coal frontier in County Durham. Placing both novels in the context of earlier depictions of the agricultural and industrial frontiers of Argentina and North East England, I show how, despite the very different geopolitical situations to which they respond, Schweblin’s and Myer’s narratives share certain thematic, stylistic, and formal likenesses in their mediation of the volatile and violent dynamics of commodity frontiers.