Much of the most commercially successful hip-hop of the 2010s reveled in the ephemerality and hype of digital cultures. This music jettisoned “street” poeticism for an improvised palette of garbled Auto-Tune experiments, hyperactive ad-lib flurries, and absurdly persistent repetition. This chapter offers a panoramic survey of the aesthetic development of this “mumble rap” in the context of streaming services and social media, briefly examining work by Lil Wayne, Future, Young Thug, Chief Keef, Migos, Travis Scott, Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti. Stylistic links are located across this dizzyingly diverse and amorphous genre, foregrounding rap vocals that assume an (in)authenticity fostered in “techno-human syntheses.”

The overarching question addressed in this chapter is how to study spatial semantics in individual languages. This question refers to individual languages by way of foregrounding documentation, description, and typology. At the same time, the discussion should be useful for students of spatial semantics in child language, psycholinguistics, and corpus-based research. It proceeds from a consideration of the kinds of concepts that populate the spatial domain (Section 9.1). This is followed by several sections that examine the lexicalization and grammaticalization of spatial properties across languages (Sections 9.2–9.6). An inventory of tools and methods for the study of spatial semantics concludes (Section 9.7).

This considers the crossovers between lesbian and spinster identities in the interwar period. Lesbian novels by Radclyffe Hall, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rosamond Lehmann, and Clemence Dane are scrutinized in the context of sexological debates about perversity and abnormality, advice literature on female friendship and arguments about lesbian modernism and female masculinity. I develop queer readings of the ‘apparitional lesbian’ and question whether the lesbian heroine can be rescued from isolation. Such arguments are related to the normalising and coding of same-sex desire in autobiographical accounts.

The introduction of devolution fundamentally changed the nature of the policy-making and policy-implementing process in Northern Ireland. It also required that local political actors in Northern Ireland refocus their attentions away from the constitutional question and consider broader policy questions. This chapter details the growing pervasiveness of EU policies and outlines the extent to which the increasing policy competence of the Union impacts on the policy remit of the Northern Ireland devolved unit. The region’s response to this new policy environment is identified via an examination of a series of official policy documents produced by the Northern Ireland Executive, Northern Ireland Assembly and the European Commission since 1999. The chapter notes that the development of a vision for Northern Ireland’s engagement with the EU has tentatively emerged. Pronouncements in relation to managing and directing the EU agenda suggest the emergence of a more advanced and sophisticated engagement with the EU. Importantly, these dynamics and developments were aided by direct engagement between Belfast and Brussels – a situation which was permitted by the UK government. Progress in the EU policy domain has been dependent on the domestic national political arena and is not solely attributable to new and novel forms of governance.

Using critiques of ‘the human’ drawn from Black feminism, this chapter examines the aesthetic components of ‘race’ as the concept begins, in the early nineteenth century, to resemble its current form. After a brief introduction featuring Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), the main test cases are early to mid-decade representations of Khoikhoi women and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The chapter ends by looking forward to works like Sanditon by Jane Austen and Ourika (1823) by Claire de Duras. Ultimately, the chapter aims to show that the 1810s were a period where the concept of race became simultaneously more unsettled and more established as a distinct realm of human experience. Further, it argues for the crucial role aesthetic representation played in this contradictory state of affairs and in the development of modern identity categories.

This chapter looks at the way French Government evolved in each occupation and the means by which the French attempted to secure nobles' allegiance. It examines the nobilities of Lorraine and Savoy with an eye to their plural nature, beginning with the bulk of the nobility the families often referred to, inaccurately, as 'sword' nobles. The older feudal nobility of Lorraine proved particularly difficult for the French to deal with in the months after the conquest. France's relationship with the nobility of Savoy was significantly different to that with the Lorrain nobles. French strategies were conditioned by certain expectations of noble behaviour, which could be incompatible with non-French nobilities. For many nobles in Lorraine and Savoy, the wars of Louis XIV's reign proved particularly awkward, given the strength of ties that existed over the frontier and the level of ensuing disruption.

Richard Attenborough has employed his many skills of negotiation, persistence and patience to achieve many of his objectives. By directing twelve films and by producing a further five, he has shown that he has been able to adapt to both the far-reaching changes within the film industry and in the nature of popular film culture. Attenborough's career might have taken a different path if he had continued with the innovation in style and technique demonstrated in his first film, Oh! What a Lovely War. In many of his own instigations, including Gandhi, Cry Freedom, Chaplin and Grey Owl, Attenborough has employed the biopic in the manner of Lord Reith 'to inform, educate and entertain' his audience as well as fulfilling his personal ambition of projecting his heroes on film. The title of Attenborough's last film, Closing the Ring is a prophetic title with which to end his directorial career.

Within the space of roughly two decades, Sweden has changed from a neutral country to one that is currently engaged in a range of activities and practices that are far removed from the definition of neutrality. Its engagement with NATO, contribution of forces to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya, and its role as a leading framework nation in the emergent EU Battle Groups suggest at first glance the shifting demands of global security practices. The rationale of the move away from traditional state-centric security, however, obscures a more complex picture. In this chapter, we investigate specific aspects of these changes in relation to Swedish security policy, specifically robust forms of military intervention. We argue that rather than reflecting global security practices, deeper endogenous processes are at work. Significantly, such engagements are part of disembedding norms around neutrality and revising public and elite memory of Sweden as a neutral state. By focusing on identity and memory, we posit that Sweden’s current military engagements are concerned with rewriting identity and with a view to making new memories (or a ‘memory bank’) of wartime experiences. This has played a crucial part in not only justifying and naturalizing specific practices and actions, but also reconstituting identity in the process.