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International audience; "Environmental aesthetics encompasses aesthetic relationships to and in the environment, including an urban aesthetic and an aesthetic of nature—which emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries both from the sciences and from the distinction from the scientific in the aesthetic observations of nature. Environmental aesthetics notably comprises philosophical, artistic, and geographical work. Increasingly since the 1990s, the social and environmental crisis, and particularly climate change, is and has been causing shifts within this field of research and reflection. As of the 2020s, the admiration humans can bear toward nature is not without fear of its disappearance caused by their own activities. Ethics is more and more linked to aesthetics as humans are morally affected by this catastrophic environmental degradation. Thus, a certain anxiety quickly reveals itself in the face of planetary transformations. What can the geographer do? Since the 1990s, the discipline has been inviting thought about the environment from the aesthetic experience, challenging or interrogating the perception, understanding, and relationship to the natural surroundings. The geographer has been attempting to apprehend through creative research—such as “psychogeographical” situational walks (dérive, situation of inquiry, influence map), and, more generally, artistic works firmly rooted in the whole landscape question—the ways of redefining local situations and places. The need is to face three major challenges. First, there is the necessity to explore how planetary threats transform the perceptions of the environment. Anxieties reflect the difficulties of politics. Second, an aesthetic of the ordinary should be investigated as an ordinary environmentalism, meaning that which is related to the daily creation of environments. Third, the importance of research creation and ecoplastic forms of art needs to be highlighted (art and environment-making processes)."

Several, independent data analyses demonstrate that neither rural-urban nor urban-rural migrations are as permanent as one normally assumes; return is common within a few years. Return from rural-urban migration is more prevalent among men and the less-well-educated and is strongly associated with rejoining a spouse. Age of return to a rural area is bimodal, peaking around age 20 and among children; no evidence of return upon retirement is apparent. Across countries, more than half return to a district other than their origin. Returned migrants’ rural incomes are greater than those of people who remained at home, both on average and among measurably equivalent groups. Upward mobility in income in towns is affirmed, particularly for the less-well-educated. Seasonal migration is more common among men and the better educated and by individuals, not joint families. Seasonal migration in India as well as step and onward migration elsewhere are not as common as is popularly claimed.

The conclusion draws together the diverse narrative strands that characterized the 19th- and 20th-century colonial humanitarian project. It reemphasizes the argument of the book by redirecting attention to the colonial ambivalence towards animals. It argues that the colonial project of protection towards animals – a largely unsuccessful one at that – demonstrated how the colonial state, predicated on benevolence, constantly sought to control, subjugate and discipline its subjects – human and non-human. Nonhuman animals became powerful signifiers and markers of identities, and yet remained marginal to the larger project of colonial control, which was bent on dominating human subjects more than nonhumans. Each of the case studies in the preceding chapters – politics of rinderpest control, slaughterhouse inspection, and carters’ strikes are the outcome of the colonial ambivalence. Additionally, the conclusion argues that knowledge produced in the colony was a product of a network of material, social, and scientific relations between and among human and non-human actors.

This chapter discusses the ways in which horror stories and creatures invade the space of spectators and players in gimmick horror screenings, experiential cinema, and video games—including those using augmented and virtual reality technologies. It considers films and games that engage the space of viewing and playing—the augmented auditorium, which augments the experience of the horror tales by inviting active participation and providing a sensorial experience beyond seeing and hearing (involving drafts, smells, motion). Case studies include William Castle’s gimmick horror films of the 1950s and ’60s, contemporary Secret Cinema screenings, and a variety of survival horror games.

This tale of animals and Empire in colonial Calcutta rests at the intersection of three scholarships: history of science/medicine, environmental history and urban history. The introduction situates this study in the larger historiographical narrative and describes the contribution of the project to South Asian scholarship and beyond. Much of the extant literature on environmental history has gone toward arguing for the role of nature as a historical actor. But it has been relatively less emphatic toward the study of non-human subjects, particularly domestic animals in empire building. The novelty and richness of the book lies in its invocation of complex networks of human and nonhuman actors in an empire to inform the metropolitan scientific imagination. It also foregrounds the theoretical underpinnings and methodology of this book by highlighting what is new about this work.

Chapter 4 conceptualizes the device of ‘manifestation,’ the term identifying the causal power of desires, thoughts, and words to call forth objects and even characters in Shakespeare’s comic world. In the spirit of critic Elena Zupančič, the device shows, among other things, the way that comedy can surface the amusing monstrousness and presumptuousness of human wishes. The concept of manifestation entails various literary and dramatic values that characterize Shakespearean comedy. Historically, it reflects interests and theories found in Renaissance treatises on magic, and it even parallels certain modern-day linguistic patters. The chapter formalizes and theorizes the device, drawing examples from a range of comedies. The Comedy of Errors (Dr. Pinch), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Helana and the love potion), and The Merry Wives of Windsor (the Witch of Brainford) come in for special discussion. The chapter ends by situation manifestation in relation to entrance effects in medieval and Tudor drama and to allegorical effects in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

This chapter discusses the early work of experimental filmmaker and artist Barbara Hammer. Focusing on the first two decades of her career, it demonstrates how Hammer’s working method demands the expansion of the parameters of the idea of feminist queer cinema to encompass the many methods, mediums, and types of experiments a queer artist might employ to capture changing notions of identity and art over time. In her shift from an emphasis on female and, especially, lesbian bodies in the 1970s to an emphasis on places and an exploration of her medium in the 1980s, Hammer illustrates an expansive approach to creativity and queer expressivity within her film art.

The (almost) universal extension of capitalist production and distribution processes has spread the “culture of consumption” to virtually every corner of the globe. This chapter discusses the relationship between spaces of consumption—shopping malls in particular—and the processes of identity construction. It begins with a brief review of the first works to examine consumption and its spaces without viewing them as neutral backgrounds where the distribution of goods would take place, but rather as physical and symbolic spaces in their own right. Further on, recent approaches that have been most influenced by symbolic interactionism are also analyzed. These perspectives, by putting the actor’s point of view and their concrete daily practices at the center of research, understood the processes of identity negotiation and the practice of shopping as an ordinary, contextual, and situated activity.

Focusing on Early and Middle Byzantine (fourth-to-twelfth-century) objects, images, and texts, this essay explores the tension between, on the one hand, efforts of the Byzantine church and state to discourage and control bodily adornment and modification and, on the other hand, the extensive evidence of widespread and immoderate engagement with these practices. The enhancement and manipulation of Byzantine bodies is considered as both a real and a metaphoric phenomenon. Evidence culled from secular and sacred, written and material sources demonstrates the importance of bodily adornment and modification to our understanding of Byzantine material and visual culture.

This chapter looks at exemplary musicals of the 1940s to show how they can readily be read as “queer” even when they are not openly “gay.” For, despite the predominance of conservative romance plots clinching the future of a male-female couple, many 1940s musicals registered the incoherence characterizing the culture’s understanding of effeminacy in relation to manliness, of homosexuality in relation to heterosexuality, and of deviance in relation to normality. Although today we may see those relations as homologous, in the 1940s they foregrounded fissures in the dominant ideology as it classified sexual dissidence by making it invisible and illegal. The chapter looks at examples of sexual dissidence in show numbers, a military pairing, homosocial buddy pairings, and comedic drag sequences. The films examined are Down to Earth, Up in Arms, Anchors Aweigh, Two Guys from Texas, Road to Morocco, and Bathing Beauty.

This chapter tracks a recent trend in queer narrative films that minimize psychological transparency, leave plot lines unresolved, and make facial close-ups affectively illegible. Such opacities regarding story and character refocus spectators instead on nuanced operations of power within specific cultural milieus. Thus, these films yield stealth versions of political cinema, hailing audiences into complex acts of richly intersectional social analysis and pushing film’s formal capacities to convey “personal” stories in ways that evade voyeurism and deprioritize identification. After opening with the Oscar-winning Moonlight (2016), which stipulates its lead character’s inscrutability to himself and others, including audiences, this inquiry delves further into three lesser-known contemporaries: Spa Night (2016), about a closeted Korean American teen; They (2017), a meditation on gender transition and national exile; and Tomcat (2016), an Austrian parable of the unknowability of humans and other animals.

The Gorozhane (The Urbanites) was the first independent literary association to seek official recognition since the early 1930s. As such, the group represents the emergence of a transitional social sphere in the Soviet Union. While insisting on their autonomy and non-engagement with Soviet cultural and political life, the Urbanites nevertheless were not content to remain underground and sought recognition from official Soviet institutions. The group is also an example of the simultaneous adaptation and depoliticization of early revolutionary culture in the 1960s. Actively modeling themselves on the literary collectives of the early post-revolutionary period and drawing on the arsenal of literary tools developed by Russian and Soviet modernists (Andrey Platonov, Isaac Babel, Yuri Olesha, and others), the Urbanites nevertheless viewed literature as a radically autonomous sphere, existing outside of politics, history, and ideology, and adopted modernist literary devices without regard for the historical circumstances and ideological conflicts that shaped them.

This chapter begins with a comparative analysis of pain’s importance to three prominent nineteenth-century literary modes: sentimentalism, naturalism, and realism. It then turns to the distinctive aesthetic and ethical priorities of the high realism practiced by William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. It concludes with an extended analysis of Howellsian realism as the first of several examples of the high realist aesthetic. From the outset of his career, Howells explored the idea that a more refined literary sensibility hinges on a subtle sensitivity to suffering of various kinds, emphasizing a view of the elevated individual as possessing a heightened ability not just to experience pain but to manage his or her own reactions to it in a sophisticated fashion. Even in his most socially engaged fiction, Howells evinces a preference for a troubled, ruminative, and restrained affective response to others’ suffering over reactions his works portray as rash, boorish, or at best ill-conceived.

Whereas some religiously themed puppet or otherwise “popular” productions were overwhelmingly successful with Parisian critics and audiences, Maurice Bouchor and Ernest Chausson’s La Légende de Sainte-Cécile and, later, the Théâtre du Vaudeville’s unsuccessful production of Armand Silvestre and Eugène Morand’s Les Drames sacrés (with music by Charles Gounod) were colossal failures both with the critics and with the public by virtue of their dependence on editorial intervention as a means through which to modernize ancient stories. In these cases, critics indicted the works as insincere—a fatal flaw when it came to the representation of sacred subjects on secular stages. Through analyses of these short works, this chapter examines how each work navigated the slippage between avant-garde aesthetics and Catholic tradition and reveals two opposite but closely related processes of critical success and failure: while successful works eschewed the intellectual aura of Symbolism in favor of traditional and “sincere” engagements with Catholic heritage, these failed productions embraced the complexities of modern music and drama—authorial decisions that, in the end, rendered them insincere for Parisian audiences and thus incapable of being perceived as truly religious.

Debates concerning the appropriate nature of sacred music in France persisted throughout the nineteenth century. While many figures within the Catholic Church took the more traditional stance in their proclamation of plainchant as the genre of sacred music par excellence, other priests and church musicians insisted that more modern styles of composition were not only appropriate but necessary for French Catholics. This debate was not limited to the confines of the Church: Republican composers, for their part, also contributed their views on the matter, which largely stated that the realms of sacred and secular were not mutually exclusive. This chapter outlines the debate on both sides in order to reveal how Republican composers absorbed the numerous criteria involved in the composition of sacred music into their secular constructions of French music. It also reveals the discursive slippages between Catholic denigrations of “modern” religious music and “secular” compositional styles: more often than not, modern religious music was strikingly close to the Catholic ideal, even when it was written by a decidedly secular composer for non-liturgical use. A study of Contes mystiques, a collection of twelve mélodies written by such composers as Gabriel Fauré, Théodore Dubois, Henri Maréchal, and Pauline Viardot, reveals how Republican composers absorbed the numerous criteria involved in the composition of sacred music and how this modern music was strikingly similar to the Catholic ideal, even when written by “secular” composers for non-liturgical use.

The chapter argues that a normative view of fictionality that I have defended elsewhere allows us to put in a perspicuous way an intriguing claim by Kathleen Stock regarding the imagination. The chapter puts it in terms of the direction of fit (DoF) asymmetry: imaginings prescribed by fictions have the thetic DoF of beliefs and assertions, as opposed to the telic DoF of desires and requests. Although the chapter argues that the imagination itself lacks DoF, it argues for Stock’s claim understood in these terms: imaginings prescribed by fictions have the direction of fit of judgements and assertions, not that of directives and intentions.

Natural language allows changing the point of view in narrative texts without overt perspective-shifting operators. A well-known example of such a perspective shift is free indirect discourse. But how do hearers (readers) know that they need to change the point of view in the first place? And when there are reasons to believe that the point of view is not that of the narrator, how do they know whose perspective is being developed? These questions have been rarely addressed in the literature, with the notable exceptions of Wiebe (1990, 1994) and Hinterwimmer (2019). This chapter reviews these proposals, adds a few new observations about the importance of rhetorical structure, and proposes to incorporate all the previous insights into one unified framework.

This chapter analyzes the case of the Hilltop Youth, a radical, violent, and lawless group of young Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank. The major argument is that an explanation to their extremist ideology and messianic activism can be found is their yearning for meaning in what they deem as an increasingly precarious and unstable reality. In their struggle to alleviate and solidify the world they live in, they opt for a very militant reading of their faith as a guiding and reassuring compass toward redemption. Such a path is fraught with violence and aggression toward Palestinians as well as toward Israeli authorities. On the road to what these unruly adolescents believe will lead them to their ultimate salvation, everyone else is a threat and every means is sacred. The chapter emphasizes the rapid degradation of recognized “truths” around them and their young age—malleable and vulnerable to unrestrained calls for action—as the Hilltop Youth main catalysts for embracing fierce lawlessness as their quest of choice for meaning.

Intersectionality is gaining popularity as a lens through which the experiences of marginalized populations can be considered. However, in regards to cultural research, how can an intersectional sensibility be implemented to ensure the complete picture of a given phenomenon is captured? The purpose of this chapter is to understand how to engage intersectionality as a lens to conceptualize the cultural research process. How intersectionality can be framed as an analytic sensibility in psychological research is first examined. Then an ecological conceptualization of culture is highlighted that incorporates tenets of intersectionality, and an exploration is presented of how intersectionality disrupts dominant ideas within cultural research processes and methodologies. The chapter concludes by detailing how quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research can reflect intersectionality as an analytic sensibility when aiming to conduct cultural research.

This chapter demarcates the scope and parameters of the book, first by defining the term “violence,” and then by outlining the three pillars that support the chapters that follow: performance, ethics, and poetics. This discussion is not meant to be exhaustive but rather a foundation painted with broad strokes to allow for the subsequent chapters to go into more detail with respect to the particulars of the plays being studied. The section on performance lays out the book’s theoretical approach and provides some historical conditions of performance, as most of the tragedies studied in the book were performed around their date of publication. The chapter then delineates the connections between ethics and tragedy before revisiting the poetics of sixteenth-century French tragedy and the use of onstage violence as a dramaturgical device.

The ethics of our individual consumer behavior regarding the work of immoral artists is complex. Some commentators claim that it is morally wrong to continue engaging with the work of artists who commit immoral acts. After dismissing consequentialist arguments in favor of this position, this chapter argues that we have considerable moral latitude when it comes to our private choices about art consumption. Our public art consumption, on the other hand, can have a social meaning that is independent of our intentions. The chapter argues that, ultimately, ethical consumption of art is about how we engage with art rather than what art we engage with.

This chapter explores the content and strategy of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) by describing the speech that sustains and promotes the movement. It explicates the content of the movement through the protest chants and other communicative tools M4BL has borrowed from past black liberatory movements. After a brief discussion of some of the challenges facing the movement, it describes four more novel communicative tools associated with M4BL—the hashtag and slogan #BlackLivesMatter, videos of police violence, naming the dead, and stereotype engineering. Each of these tools helps address some challenge, and also bears on some questions of independent philosophical interest—how to remedy testimonial injustice, what it means to engineer a concept, what makes a mental state a moral attitude. It concludes with a brief discussion of the limitations of some of these tools.

In a materialist vitalism that emerged, nerve force as a physical energy was assumed to give idiosyncratic shape to organisms, races, and species. Borrowing from evolutionary theory and biometrics, Oliver Wendell Holmes suggests in Elsie Venner that the vital force of the average members of a race or species will prevail, while hybrids at the edges of the vital bell curve will expire, a principle that applies as well to literature, which has its own vital curve. William Dean Howells promotes a naturalized realism of the healthy, national (white, middle-class) average. W. E. B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins take on the task of establishing the African American race as vigorous and empowered rather than enervated—and of eluding constraining racial definition by oscillating between biological and immaterial conceptions of racial force.

Chapter 1, “Drama Uncloseted in Boston,” argues that American urbanity began at home. The cosmopolitanism practiced in elite domestic spaces after the American Revolution signaled an urban future; in opening these homes to a broader public, novels would transform it. But not without serious resistance. Instead of embracing urbanity after the revolution, Bostonians strained to negotiate competing desires for republican equality and cosmopolitan sophistication. This tension found a fitting narrative in a public scandal of incestuous infidelity, pregnancy, and suicide involving Perez Morton, a prominent Boston lawyer and drama aficionado; his wife, poet Sarah Wentworth Morton; and her sister, Fanny Apthorp, whose published suicide notes were widely read. I trace the scandal’s circulation through Boston newspapers, as a subplot in William Hill Brown’s 1789 novel The Power of Sympathy, and in three plays, two by Brown himself, that were printed for private performances in Boston, where public theater remained illegal. These texts offer a fascinating case study of the formally diverse and multivocal print culture in which cosmopolitan culture clashed with new ideas about American urbanity. The epistolary novel emerged as a form concerned not with the past or present, I argue, but with the future—a future that writes out of existence the varied voices, especially female and Black voices, present in the plays, poetry, and papers.

The book concludes with an epilogue, “The Invisible Hand,” that explores the afterlife of Doré’s imagery as it has been subject to creative erasure. The extent to which these images have been appropriated and adapted is foregrounded in the very process of their original creation, as Doré’s designs were transformed into reproducible matrices through the work of the engravers. The examples of cutting and overpainting of Doré’s work with which the book concludes should be understood not as iconoclastic but as entirely consistent with and the inevitable outcome of both the history of the Bible writ large and Doré’s intervention therein.

The major task of this closing chapter is to strive for reconciliation between the very divergent positions and perspectives on successful ageing that have been outlined in this book. The building blocks enabling at least partial reconciliation are the emphasis of the need for pluralism in conceptual reasoning on the notion of successful ageing; the insistence that one must be aware of the full implications of choosing any particular model of successful ageing; and the claim that the discourse on successful ageing can only, to a limited extent, be driven by empirical data. Instead, illuminating the underlying normative conceptions of what it means to enjoy a good life in old age is key to arrive at a more holistic picture of successful ageing that comes with heuristic utility. At the same time, visions of the good life in old age need further elaboration, but remaining ambivalences seem unavoidable.

This chapter argues that Zhuangzi was an intellectual outlier who was not a significant participant in the debate on humaneness versus justice, carried out primarily among the Confucians, the Mohists, the Laoists, and the fajia thinkers during the classical period. He ridiculed the misguided character of the dominant intellectual projects and warned against their potential for inhumanity and injustice, the very opposite of what is intended by the participants of the mainstream discourse. He extoled personal freedom within the context of overwhelming emphasis on order, structured by humaneness and/or justice, and single-handedly opened up a critical space for the discourse on personal freedom in Chinese intellectual history. However, the marginal nature of the Zhuangist vision of personal freedom did not portend well its prospect in the subsequent Chinese history. The kind of freedom envisioned by Zhuangzi is an effortless navigation through and around the constraints of the human lifeworld, not a reimagining of those very constraints.

Water is key to human life, both biophysically and socioculturally. Having long been regarded in anthropology as a circumstantial backdrop to human society and culture, water—alongside other nonhuman substances and beings—has received growing attention as a material with specific potentials and histories in the 21st century. This research explores the fundamental connectivity and relationality of water, through which social relations and hydrological flows are often two sides of the same coin, shaping and transforming each other. Watery materiality is frequently characterized by movement and instability, defying control but also intersecting with other social and material processes to create ever new arrangements. Water practices, infrastructures, and experiences participate in the formation and transformation of spaces and landscapes, and may inspire novel theoretical insights on meaning-making, kinship, learning, and space, among other topics. Water’s valuation and the tensions that arise regarding how to govern it emerge in part from its material properties. Ongoing discussions explore the links between these properties, water infrastructures, unequal distribution, and political power. Watery materiality is not a single thing, but has multiple manifestations, including saltwater, ice, and humidity. Some scholars therefore propose studying water and materiality in terms of various forms of wetness or amphibious processes. Research into water and materiality suggests that the material world consists of open processes rather than of fixed objects, and that water’s multiple manifestations and flows actively participate in shaping human lives.

In the last quarter of the 20th century theories of the postcolonial were usually closely tied to the experience of British and French colonialism in a band of North African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian colonies stretching from Morocco to Malaysia. During this period, Edward Said’s book Orientalism and the early work in subaltern studies both challenged the supposedly dispassionate character of Western scholarship on North Africa and Asia by demonstrating the degree to which it had been skewed by racial and class bias. Although architectural historians took more than a decade to fully absorb its implications, there are few humanities or social sciences disciplines that since the 1990s have been more thoroughly transformed by this once radical shift in perspective, which has changed how the architecture of almost all parts of the world is understood. Whether or not they fully engaged with the theories articulated in scholarship whose initial focus was the analysis of literature, in the case of Said, or of history, in that of subaltern studies, 21st-century architectural historians have paid unprecedented attention to the post-1500 architecture of the Global South, to colonial architecture and its relationship to economic exploitation, to post-independence architecture especially in relation to international modernisms, and to the impact that colonialism had on the architecture of the metropole. While the second and third of these had long been addressed in relation to British settler colonies, architectural history’s global turn meant that they could no longer be considered in isolation from new comprehensive histories of imperialism.

William Shakespeare entertained many ideas about music, some of them conflicting, and he frequently represented these ideas in his plays. Music was a multifaceted art and science in early modern England, and debates over the nature and interpretation of music played out in a variety of contexts: academic, religious, political, commercial, and aesthetic. At the same time, music was a vital part of Shakespeare’s theatrical practice. He made use of his company’s musical resources to include performed music in his plays, and his characters frequently sing and quote popular ballads and songs that would have been recognized by his audiences. The combination of words about music and musical performances gave Shakespeare the opportunity to test various theories of music in complex and original ways. His plays are especially demonstrative of the ways in which certain views of music were connected to other ideological perspectives. Shakespeare’s most modern idea about music is the notion that musical meaning derives from its contexts and conventions rather than from an inherent, universal nature. Taken together, his plays provoke skepticism about unified theories of music. At the same time, they demonstrate that the seeming universality of music makes it an extremely powerful tool for both the polemicist and the dramatist.

As an eccentric outlaw crime film, Terrence Malick’s Badlands employs expressive sensory immersion, eccentric humor, and a concern for the relationship between history and human experience. The past, in Badlands, is a complex ontological ground for the characters’ (and audiences’) senses of being in the world, a temporalized film world akin to a field of pure immanence within the uncanny strangeness of material reality. A film set in the fifties, but far more concerned with transhistorical philosophical questions, Badlands uses the musical soundtrack to explore these existential concerns. Within this musically heterogeneous film, the two most important sources of compiled non-diegetic classical music (the pedagogical music of Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman and the early compositions of Erik Satie) function as active philosophical agents, cultivating embodied states of play and melancholy that strive, albeit ambiguously and inconclusively, to create meaning from the raw immediacy of experience.

This chapter discusses the emergence of the through-song British musical, also known as “pop opera.” This can be dated from the afternoon of March 1, 1968, when parents (mainly mothers) of students at Colet Court School watched an end-of-term performance of a twenty-minute version of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. By 1991, Lloyd Webber and Rice had officially created the first performance in the history of pop opera which was Jesus Christ Superstar (1971). Lloyd Webber's ability to compose consistently in a single voice, or to eclecticize, in other words, to teach the audience to navigate the action through musical signifiers is not appreciated enough. Tim Rice's ease in “conversationalizing” the bigger-than-life figures that pop opera delights in is similarly underrated, because he makes it look easy. The biggest hit in this period of musical history is Les Misérables (1985). This show's saga started when Alain Boublil sees Superstar and decides to write something comparable. It was written with composer Claude-Michel Schönberg.

This chapter introduces the main protagonist of the book: Carlo Calà Duke of Diano, a jurist and high-ranking official in the viceregal administration. This chapter also sets the historical context of the story of the forgery by describing the main political, economic, social, and religious characteristics of the Kingdom of Naples in the seventeenth century. More specifically, this chapter explains the social, cultural, and intellectual advantages that a noble pedigree conferred to the Neapolitan non-aristocratic elites; explores the main sources of tension between the papacy and the Neapolitan viceroy; sheds light on the power dynamics between the Roman Inquisition and the local ecclesiastical leaders; and introduces the complexities of the liturgical and devotional life of early modern Catholics.

This chapter establishes the theoretical and conceptual basis for the book by first defining neoliberalism, reviewing the various challenges that have emerged in addressing the complex and multifaceted nature of neoliberalism. It then provides an overview of the theoretical frameworks for understanding neoliberalism and how they might be adopted for the study of language and subjectivity. It contrasts Marxist and Foucauldian approaches to neoliberalism, proposing a synthesis in which Foucault’s insights are used to clarify how the neoliberal shaping of subjectivities works to obscure class-based inequalities and to rationalize increasing precarity of life under intensifying capitalism and the global economy. Finally, the chapter considers how such processes of subjectivity might be traced through theoretical and analytic constructs from sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, especially through the analysis of metapragmatic discourse.

Part III examines the new importance that Baudelaire attaches, following the trial of Les Fleurs du Mal, to the creative imagination as an instrument of resistance and alternative ‘government’. This chapter analyses his three essays on the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe, in which Baudelaire sees Poe as exemplifying the power of the imagination both to subvert normative thinking and to confront the destructive effects of melancholy by constructing new worlds. Baudelaire finds in Poe an image—and self-portrait—of the poet as outcast and embodiment of protest, a thinker probing the mysteries of nature in search of new explanatory laws: in short, a writer engaged in what Baudelaire calls ‘conjecturisme’. For Poe, as for Baudelaire’s alternative poet-lawgiver, beauty is a form of justice, and the public value of poetry lies not in overt didacticism but in the carefully crafted articulation of an original moral and intellectual vision.

It is axiomatic that the Roman emperor attempted to control the city populace through an ideology of ‘bread and circuses’ (free grain and public entertainment). Yet a riot during a food crisis in 189 ce, which began in the circus and spread to the streets, shows that spectators could be the agents of political interaction at public spectacles rather than merely passive participants, that public spectacles could be organizing events for the non-elite population. It has been argued that crowds in order to form require a ‘notion of legitimation’. Indeed, the crowd at this riot was engendered in part through the long-standing conventions of spectatorship at Roman public spectacles, including 1) public spectacles as venues for popular protest and interactions with the emperor; 2) the custom of arranged seating, including claques, factions, and trade guilds (collegia); 3) common forms of spectator response, such as acclamations.

The aims, scope, structure and cultural background of the present volume are outlined here. It aims to present progressive current thought in the field and indicate directions for future work. It also juxtaposes Greek and Roman games and spectacle, to shed light on similarities and differences in the two cultures, and also to suggest parallels in other cultures, including our own. It aims to facilitate research and provoke thinking in particular aspects of Greek sport and Roman spectacle. The focus of the collection is to an extent in the social contexts of games, namely the evolution of sport and spectacle diachronically and geographically across cultural and political boundaries, and how games are adapted to multiple contexts and multiple purposes, reinforcing, for example, social hierarchies, performing shared values, and playing out deep cultural tensions. This chapter also interrogates the terms for sport today and in antiquity, and presents the high value placed on sport by ‘following the money’ in both eras.

Extoling and promoting listening is deeply ingrained in sound art practice and discourse, even on occasion its raison d’être, where listening is understood as a wholly congenial, benign activity. This can be seen through the routine use of affirmative tropes such as, through listening we: connect, locate, are embodied, discern, are immersed or enveloped. And through specific listening methods such as Deep Listening, we are offered ‘expand[ed] consciousness to the whole space/time continuum of sound/silences’ (Oliveros, 2005, p. xxiv). Refocusing from the act of listening to the audiological—the mechanisms related to the sense of hearing—from the findings of the author’s recent research, in particular his review on the noise impact of high-speed hand dryers (Drever, 2013), the author feels obliged to assert that the contrary is a reality for many—hearing, from time to time or incessantly: perturbs, isolates, excludes, disconnects, disembodies, and dislocates, hearing hurts! This will be familiar for those living with hyperacusis, misophonia, and phonophobia, but it can also be the case for those with particular hearing needs such as the partially sighted, hearing aid users or those with sensitive hearing such as infants and ASD. Bringing audiology into the sphere of sound art, this chapter recognizes a prevailing sensitization of hearing in the culture at large, and proposes a paradigm for situating hearing that diverges from a singular, idealized, symmetrical model of hearing, the auraltypical, that has predominated. In its place, we are beginning to enjoy a fluidity and openness to diverse forms of hearing and sensitive hearers in sound art, on embracing the emerging agenda of auraldiversity.

Discussed most often as a musical genre and queer familial structure, house has long been a home for Blackness—and for femininity. This chapter theorizes a notion of Black queer femmeness along the sounds, affects, and vibrations of house. Through charting the use of Black female vocals across the genre’s origins in the early 1980s, dance pop in the early 1990s, and the mid-2010s’ house resurgence in both the mainstream and indie spheres, this chapter explores how house simultaneously amplifies the femininity of Black female house vocalists and detaches femininity from gendered bodies altogether. In the process, it posits that house works as an affective, or felt, political and cultural configuration, one that opens up the space for new relationalities within and between Black, queer, and/or femme communities. By charting how musical artists continue to return to house’s aesthetics and affective power, this chapter invites readers to listen and feel with the recent past(s) of house music for guidance and inspiration on navigating structural oppressions that continue to reverberate across time: governmental neglect of the life chances of Black and Brown people, police violence against Black and Brown people, and the looming presence of anti-Black racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. Through such an engagement with the recent past, house accentuates the ongoing resonances between the 1980s and today.

Where does affect reside in a phenomenology of perception? How should we understand ethics when bodies are close? What changes when we are distant? In this chapter, the author illustrates the “aesthetics of proximity,” degrees of spatio-temporal as well as spatio-tactile closeness between sounds and bodies, and the implications for an embodied ethics of response. Using Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “flesh,” which he defines as an element (like water or fire), the author explores the relation of feeling and matter in close encounters, evoking Sufi sounds of worship in Morocco and France, as well as the Black Lives Matter movement during a global pandemic.

There is a palpable difference between Addison’s stimulating and thoughtful remarks on literature or the visual arts and his scattered, unconvincing, and dismissive comments on music. His unease about music, the chapter argues, stemmed from ignorance, disappointment, and a tendency to link musical pleasure with secret or illicit sexual pleasure. By basing his aesthetic theory on sight, Addison was able to make contact with scientific discourse, indirectly express his political ideology, and avoid extensive discussions of music, the art about which he knew least. His attempt at an English opera (Rosamond, 1707) failed, and the libretto does not suggest that Addison gave much thought to what it might be like to set or sing his words. As a young man, he wrote two St Cecilia odes, closely following the conventions established in Dryden’s ode for 1687. Printed in the Annual miscellany for 1694 is his translation of an episode from Ovid that purports to explain ‘the secret Cause’ that makes the River Salmacis weaken those who bathe in it. Something about the power of music, its emotional and sensual influence on the body and the mind, was evidently connected in his mind with secret pleasures that he did not wish to acknowledge or reveal. Same-sex love was probably among such pleasures. While there is no definitive evidence that Addison had strong homosexual feelings, or that he acted upon them, there is reason to believe that he associated such feelings with music, an association which shaped his consciousness and therefore his aesthetics.

This chapter discusses Article 6 of Directive 2019/790 regarding the copyright in Europe, which allows cultural heritage institutions to make copies of any works or other subject matter in any format or medium for the purposes of preservation. It examines the mandate on Member States to permit cultural heritage institutions to reproduce works and other subject matter to address technological obsolescence or the degradation of original supports. It also refers to the acts of reproduction undertaken by cultural heritage institutions that are subject to the authorisation of rightholders. The chapter looks at the statute that permit cultural heritage institutions that do not have the technical means or expertise to request the assistance of other cultural institutions and other third parties to preserve their collections. It clarifies the consideration of works and other subject matter to be permanent in the collection of a cultural heritage institution.

This chapter presents a novel theory of commodification. According to Marx, commodification is a process by which exchange value comes to dominate use value. Markets, money, and profit-orientation are instruments that facilitate the subjugation of use value to exchange value. However, the book takes market value, rather than exchange value, as the denominator of use value. Market value depends on supply and demand and is open to manipulation and speculation. The chapter, furthermore, argues that commodification is a process and, subsequently, distinguishes between formal, real, and fictitious commodification. Typically, real commodification (the transformation of goods and services) follows formal commodification (the imposition of a price), but in some cases products first have to be standardized in order to become commodities that can be exchanged on a market. Fictitious commodification, i.e., the introduction of quasi-markets in public services and the transformation of service users into consumers, prepares the ground for formal and real commodification.

This chapter focuses on sounds that occur simultaneously. The concept of harmony here is broad and has a far-reaching scope; it includes functional and non-functional harmonies, color, and any other approach to simultaneous sonorities. Exercise 21 suggests the implementation of voice leading as a constructive principle through stylistic imitation. Number 22, in which “melody becomes harmony,” proposes the harmonization of a melody using exclusively its pitch content. Exercise 23 incorporates symmetrical harmonies; 24 and 25 use the harmonic series to create harmonies. In 26 the harmonies are built around major and minor triads with pitches in common. Exercise 27 incorporates the use of integer notation; 28 uses scale degrees but not triads. The base of exercise 29 is the 12-tone row; 30 uses the concept of “circle” progression or harmonies that move around the circle of fifths; 31 and 32 incorporate harmonies that move in major and minor thirds; 33 and 34 discuss overlapping triads and polytonality; 35 provides an opportunity to work with pedal tones; 36 incorporates the church modes and 37 the use of clusters (i.e., harmonies based exclusively on minor a major seconds). Exercise 38 is based on harmonic sequences; 39 and 40 discuss implied harmonies and writing “contrafacts.”

The fifth chapter develops a radical sustainability framework by examining the socioecological values in sustainability experiments that exist in different political-economic contexts, the ecovillage in the United States and the urban farm in Cuba. It asks: What are the environmental values and stories that each case demonstrates? An argument is made for a paradigm shift from human’s war with nature to human’s collaboration with nature to regenerate a thriving biosphere. This means shifting Western culture away from that of atomized, competitive, self-interested individual consumers who use technology to dominate nature. And it means shifting toward a new culture that values community ties, cooperation with the socionatural world, “plentitude” or sufficiency, local self-reliance, and physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being for all. In addition, it means creating an economy built on social justice and environmental regeneration.

This chapter discusses the way in which the criterial prefocusing of audience emotions and erotetic narration are typically coordinated in movies.

This chapter shows how Melville draws on the book of Job to discuss issues of divine justice and human suffering. It argues that Melville uses the language and themes of Job to evaluate divine jurisprudence from the vantage point of the human plaintiff, celebrating human perseverance and indicting the arbitrariness of divinely mandated suffering. After sketching out the book of Job’s textual history, the chapter discusses in turn Mardi, Moby-Dick, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and The Encantadas on these grounds, detailing how Melville uses typology and intertextual reference to examine the Bible and to apply his findings to comment on natural, social, and cultural phenomena. It concludes that Melville sees the book of Job as a story not of defiance and repentance but of the learning and growth that occur in precisely the moment when one’s preconceptions and expectations of reality are shattered.

This chapter examines the evolution of Yvonne Rainer’s interrogation of the everyday from her practice as a choreographer to her practice as a film maker where embrace of the doctrine that the “personal is political” becomes her dominant theme, making her perhaps the leading avant-garde, feminist auteur.

The chapter traces the intellectual history of the term “commodification” and presents major arguments against commodification from different strands of literature. Commodification was introduced into academic discourse in the 1970s by Marxist scholars who analyzed the transformation of culture, the emergence and spread of capitalism, as well as the nature of the welfare state. The term was then picked up by non-Marxist academics in various disciplines, usually to criticize certain kinds of monetary exchange or specific markets rather than capitalism per se. The chapter identifies three major strands of literature with distinctive arguments against commodification: the moral, pragmatic, and materialist critiques. It argues that only the materialist critique is able to see that commodification threatens the livelihood of people and the environment. After discussing differences between the three approaches, the chapter points to an important commonality: all critics of commodification believe that commodification has gone too far in recent decades.

While Strawsonians have focused on the way in which our ‘reactive attitudes’—the emotions through which we hold one another responsible for manifestations of morally significant quality of regard—express moral demands, serious doubt has been cast on the idea that non-blaming reactive attitudes direct moral demands to their targets. Building on Gary Watson’s proposal that the reactive attitudes are ‘forms of moral address’, this chapter advances a communicative view of praise according to which the form of moral address distinctive of the praise-manifesting reactive attitudes (approbation, gratitude) is moral invitation. Like moral demand, moral invitation is a species of directive address presupposing its target’s possession of distinctive agential capacities and, when valid, provides its addressee with reason to give the addressor’s directive discursive uptake. While blame’s demands issue imperatival reasons for compliance (e.g. to acknowledge wrongdoing, apologize), praise’s invitations provide discretionary reasons to accept credit in jointly valuing the significance of the act for the praiser. In addition to its phenomenological plausibility and contribution to the already fecund Watsonian-cum-Strawsonian program, the invitational view helps renders intelligible the power of our praise practices to facilitate the formation and enrichment of our interpersonal relationships.