What Alberto Manguel claims for Talmudic and Islamic book culture can be extended to the history of reception of storytelling through text and image in Mesopotamia. In this book, storytelling, in general, and mythmaking, in particular, have been categorized as essential cognitive and cultural strategies of world-making to make sense of experience, to explain social and cosmic order, and, consequently, to structure knowledge in order to respond to future challenges and expectations. Thus, cognition and cultural learning merge in the process by which the ancient scholars, whom I regard as the primary agents behind the creation of texts and images receive, reactualize, and rework former material. Due to their orientational and expository nature, storytelling and mythmaking can claim their rightful place as systems of knowledge besides other systems of knowledge, including divination, magic, Listenwissenschaft, et cetera and should be considered on a par with logical reasoning. In other words, in its endeavor to create meaning, mythmaking is an epistemic and world-making endeavor. The diachronic approach in this book made it obvious that, despite its localized expression, the creation of a cultural repertoire of text and image revolving around the ruler was shared by the elites throughout Mesopotamia and contributed to their cultural identity, self-understanding, and self-representation. This repertoire was informed by core metaphors and conveyed in all media including myth, image, architecture, and ritual, with each medium creating its own narrative framework. It has also shown that the transfer of knowledge over centuries and millennia was not transmitted in a linear manner, but rather that scholarly communities shared and retained collective knowledge over generations, choosing and reviving particular tropes in specific historical situations and contexts.

Emile Pereire was never in doubt that he and Isaac Pereire would enter business together. Family business was the norm in Sephardic Bordeaux when the Pereires were growing up. An element of Saint-Simonian vocabulary which remained constant in Isaac Pereire's rhetoric, for example, was the concept of 'association'. Luc Marco describes how the Pereires used the finance function to pioneer innovative approaches to company management, maintaining fixed capital at a minimum and circulating capital at a constant level. The Pereires recognised that education alone was insufficient to prepare their sons for the responsibilities they might assume, and actively encouraged them to augment their studies with practical experience. At the most profound level their businesses depended on trust, the core of which lay between Emile and Isaac. Trust extended to many former Saint-Simonian colleagues who were associated with Pereire businesses.

This chapter offers a condensed history of the relation between jazz and hip-hop. Framing the argument with reference to poet-activist Amiri Baraka’s 1967 essay “The Changing Same” and 1972 album It’s Nation Time, it examines the development of “jazz rap” and the use of direct references to jazz in “Golden Age” hip-hop. During this period, the chapter argues, jazz’s ambivalent position within hip-hop reflects the political ambivalence of the post-Fordist era and the defeat of the revolutionary aspirations of the 1960s, an ambivalence musically indexed in the melancholic use of jazz samples in records made in the immediately after the Golden Age. The chapter concludes by suggesting ways in which contemporary hip-hop and jazz might maintain an underground ethos closer to the radical political edge that Baraka saw in free jazz: noisy, disjunctive, experimental, and focused on change.

Leprosy sufferers detected under the 'Great Confinement' policies, and particularly those who were slaves, were sent to the Batavia leprosy asylum. The geographically isolated leprosy asylum in the Suriname colony performed an essential role in colonial society. The asylum also established a working relationship between the colonial state and the Roman Catholic Church. To provide support and sustenance for the sufferers, a symbiotic alliance developed between the colonial government and a religious group on the margins of Surinamese society, the Catholics. The Catholic presence was contested by another Christian group, the Protestant Moravians, who tried to compete with the Catholics in caring for the leprosy suffers in Suriname. Faced with the breakdown in order in the asylum, the Moravians appeared to have a chance to become established in Batavia.

Emile and Isaac Pereire were controversial figures in their own time and they remain so. In their relationship to Judaism, Saint-Simonianism, socialism, their partnership, the broad scope of their businesses, their business practices, their political allegiance, they have been subjects of criticism, comment and analysis by historians and others. Four pillars conceived as essential to banking reform were achieved either with the Pereires' direct intervention or attempted by them. It includes day-to-day banking for small merchants, for mortgage finance, for large-scale investment, and for investment finance for small business. Saint-Simonian ideology was filled with references to morality and high principles, at variance with the recurring criticism of the Pereires' financial rectitude which appears in some of the literature. The legal morass within which they were ensnarled from 1867 needs also to be considered as another dimension to their business practices.

The concluding chapter synthesizes the book’s core findings and situates them within debates on foreign aid and economic development, the political economy of development in Africa, and China’s global economic strategy. Overall, the allocation of finance in all three country case studies, Ethiopia, Zambia, and Ghana, serves to secure political support and sustain incumbents in power. However, the strategies employed to achieve these goals differ based on each country’s unique political history and ethnic dynamics. In Ethiopia’s authoritarian context, the central challenge is maintaining loyalty and support from non-coethnics within the state. The EPRDF established ethnic federalism and justified centralized control through economic growth. In Zambia, the focus is on allocating finance to maintain the support of coethnics, prioritizing loyalty within the ethnic group. In Ghana, on the other hand, preserving power involves attracting swing voters through nonethnic coalitions, resulting in the distribution of finance aimed at broad-based support. The chapter concludes by drawing policy implications for financiers and governments, emphasizing designs that account for political incentives and strengthen transparency and oversight.

The only film over which Alfonso Cuarón had full creative control before making Y tu mamá también was Sólo con tu pareja (Love in the Time of Hysteria, 1991); both films were co-written with his brother Carlos Cuarón. Y tu mamá también was produced by the company Anhelo Producciones co-founded by Cuarón and Jorge Vergara, a prominent Mexican businessman. This provided sufficient funds to make the film and launch an ambitious marketing campaign. This chapter argues that the film adopts a soft brand of corporate anti-globalisation; it presents a broad, unfocused critique of the greater evils of globalisation, while seeking to become a global product. It ends with a discussion of the gender politics of the film through a discussion of the character of Luisa and considers her as a post-feminist character central to the global success of the film.

A sudden shift that has never been fully explained took place in Jean Epstein's oeuvre in late 1927. Turning his back on melodramas that had been his mainstay since 1923, whether through social themes or critiques of heterosexual mores or both, Epstein discovered in himself a sudden and overwhelming passion for Brittany. In an interview for a local newspaper, Epstein insists at the outset that 'Finis Terrae is not a documentary'. The varied and subtle shooting and editing techniques Epstein deploys in Finis Terrae can only be sketched here and would warrant a much more detailed study. Epstein shot six other fiction (or rather semi-fiction) films in Brittany: Morv'ran, L'Or des mers , Chanson d'Armor, La Femme du bout du monde, Le Tempestaire , and Les Feux de la mer .

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on the grotesque in contemporary British fiction from a number of different perspectives. It explores how the grotesque's status as non-classical results in a paradox where it comes both before and after the establishment of classical norms. The book outlines a tradition of the grotesque in European art and literature of which the contemporary works under discussion are a part. It illuminates the economies and 'classical' nature of the aesthetics of realism, and the strength such economies still hold is demonstrated by the tenor of much of the contemporary criticism. The book examines a particular strand of the grotesque in contemporary writing.

Comics provide an essential, alternative visual space to expand hip-hop style and narratives – and even have a claim as the essential vehicle for the visual representation of hip-hop today. The visual and lyrical comic art of Ronald Wimberly is exemplary of the productive and critical relationship between comics and hip-hop. This chapter puts his collaboration with M. F. Grimm (on 2007’s Sentences) into conversation with his largest solo work, Prince of Cats (2012; rereleased 2016), to demonstrate how Wimberly’s stylistic renderings and linguistic experimentations with the sounds of hip-hop create a parallel – if absurd and satirical – historical perception and critique of the visual registers of Black life in American politics and popular culture, even as (and because) the comic form depends on the visual and the lyrical.

This chapter reviews the origins of the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed (INOU), its aims and philosophy, objectives and relations with other civil society actors and the state, up to and in the course of social partnership. It seeks to bring out the experience of the INOU in social partnership as a good illustration of the concept of asymmetric engagement in the case of the Community and Voluntary Pillar (CVP). The founders of the INOU were trade union-minded, and regarded the employed and unemployed as sharing a broadly common economic interest. The INOU's first general secretary was Eugene Hickland and he was succeeded by Mike Allen, both originally from the Galway Association of the Unemployed. One great difficulty for the INOU and local centres was to create a positive sense of identity and motivation for the unemployed.

This chapter traces the transformative literary, scientific, and cultural events of the 1810s that shaped the period’s fascination with making life out of death. It was during this tumultuous decade that debates about materialism and vitalism came to a head. Literary and scientific writers alike boldly repositioned the human mind as dependent on the body. But this brought with it a host of anxieties. What kind of immortality can reside within the embodied mind, susceptible as it is to material dissolution? What kinds of fertility – intellectual and otherwise – can withstand mortality? For some writers in the 1810s, these questions may lead darkly, as in Frankenstein, to ‘the unhallowed damps of the grave’; but for others, and especially for poets, that same grave becomes a site of regeneration. This chapter argues that the 1810s witnessed a form of Romantic decadence centred on the human body, one in which newly vocal philosophies of materialism combined with radical poetics to briefly reimagine and even celebrate the function of decay.