bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
US Sales Taxes on Cross-Jurisdictional Transactions
Authors: van Brederode Robert F
Published: February 2024

The United States is one of the few jurisdictions without a value-added tax (VAT). Instead, retail sales and use taxes are imposed at the sub-national level, that is, in most of the states. This chapter first explains the mechanics of these taxes compared to a VAT and the function of the use tax to fill the collection gap caused by the restrictions of states to tax cross-border supplies. The US Constitution limits the power of the states to tax cross-border transactions between them. An out-of-state supplier can only be coerced to collect tax if it has sufficient nexus with the taxing state. The relevant Supreme Court case law is discussed to discover the parameters of those restrictions imposed on the taxing power of the states. The remainder of the chapter is an exegesis of the imposition of sales and use taxes to cross-jurisdictional (ie between states and between taxing entities within a state) transactions in goods and (digital) services from the perspective of the application of the destination principle versus the origin principle.
China’s VAT in the Digitalized Economy
Authors: Zu Yige
Published: February 2024

The rapid growth of the digital economy has posed challenges to the administration of value-added tax (VAT) systems around the world. China, as a key player in the cross-border e-commerce market, has introduced tax and regulatory measures in response to the exponential growth in cross-border online shopping by Chinese customers. This chapter reviews the VAT measures that apply to imported low-value goods as well as the VAT treatment of imported digital supplies in China. It shows that the challenges faced by China are different from those in other countries. The Chinese approach to taxing goods and services imported by consumers appears to be satisfactory in resolving the immediate challenges posed by the digitalization of the economy. There is, nevertheless, still room for improvement in the long term.
Rethinking Reliance Damages for Breach of Contract
Authors: Taylor Richard
Published: February 2024

This chapter reviews the negative treatment of the reliance interest whereby reliance damages for breach of contract have come to be seen as expectation damages in disguise, dependent on a rebuttable presumption of recoupment. It seeks to show that this now orthodox consensus is not justified by the case law, much of which is concerned with pre-contractual wasted expenditure which is not reliance based. A long-standing error is revealed, that of equating the reliance interest with the position as though the contract had not been entered into when, at least for reliance damages for breach of contract, it should be concerned with the position as though the contractual promise had not been relied on post-contractually. The promisor’s voluntary assumption of responsibility for such reasonable reliance is posited as the basis of an independent measure of reliance damages for breach of contract, distinct from expectation damages in disguise.
Contracts and Relationships of Love and Trust
Authors: Probert Rebecca , Dodsworth Tim
Published: February 2024

This chapter provides an overview of the key dimensions of the relationship between contracts and relationships of love and trust. It explores how the idea of marriage as a contract has been used to convey different ideas about its nature at different periods (and how these multiple meanings still co-exist today). While there is little evidence of married couples using the law of contract to regulate their ongoing relationship, the last decade or so has seen important developments in the context of marital property agreements, but whether these should be understood as contracts is a moot point. The use of contracts in certain familial contexts provides a potential remedy where family law does not, such as parties cohabiting without having gone through any ceremony, but there are both risks and limits in relying on contract law to provide a solution in such cases.
The Damage in Negotiating Damages
Authors: Worthington Sarah
Published: February 2024

This chapter advances a new analysis of One Step negotiating damages, urging that the claim underpinning these awards is a claim for restitution for unjust enrichment, not a claim for damages in contract. Moreover, this unjust enrichment claim is for the enrichment derived by D from its use of C’s property without C’s consent. This use is what D has ‘taken for nothing’, and for which C seeks a remedy. Further, being an unjust enrichment claim rather than a damages claim, it is immaterial whether C has suffered economic loss. This characterisation of the One Step claim is defended by a robust analysis of the earlier cases. If accurate, it provides the clear reason why One Step ‘negotiating damages’ can only be claimed where D has made unauthorised use of C’s property. This chapter also contrasts this claim and its remedies with the proper role and measure of remedies where the claim is in contract, tort or under Lord Cairns’ Act.
Direct and Vicarious Liability of Corporations
Authors: Edelman James
Published: February 2024

This chapter elaborates on the direct and vicarious liability of corporations. It explores a broad taxonomy of the ways in which a corporation can be held responsible. A corporation might be held vicariously responsible based upon the attribution of the liability of its officers or employees, or directly responsible for its own duty including by attribution of the acts of its employees and natural persons and sometimes even acts of persons which are delegated by the corporation. Moreover, a corporation might be directly liable if it can be said that the corporation itself performed an action with the required intention. According to Ewan McKendrick, the proper resolution of questions on the liability of corporations requires a clear understanding of basic principles.
The Sale of Goods Act and the Nature of Sales
Authors: Beale Hugh
Published: February 2024

This chapter provides an overview of the sale of goods and the nature of sales. It considers the argument that the Sale of Goods Act 1979 (SGA) is no longer fit for the particular purpose of governing the kinds of transactions that are most likely to be entered by small businesses. Moreover, the SGA does not cover common types of transactions, in particular the supply of digital products, the supply of goods other than by way of sale, and the supply of services. The chapter then details the scope of the legislation ranges between digital products and supply other than by sale. It also considers general arguments surrounding the SGA, such as detailed written contracts, the power to bargain with business parties, and plain English.
Unjustified Enrichment in China: An Uncertain Path
Authors: Liu Qiao
Published: February 2024

This chapter analyses the judicial approach adopted by Chinese courts, particularly the Supreme People’s Court, in developing a critical foundation for the law of unjustified enrichment in China. It reveals that considerable uncertainty remains with the ‘absence of basis’ approach and that flexible yet elusive notions such as ‘unfairness’, ‘unreasonableness’ and ‘impropriety’ may still play a role. While such uncertainty is perhaps inevitable as Chinese courts search for a path that best suits the local environment, greater clarity and certainty is desirable. Achieving such clarity and certainty may be greatly facilitated by learning from detailed comparisons with foreign laws, including particularly the pragmatically oriented common law rules. .
Implied Terms and Restitution
Authors: Peel Edwin
Published: February 2024

This chapter takes as its starting point an observation of Ewan McKenrick’s about the effect of a valid and subsisting contract on a claim in restitution for benefits conferred thereunder. In particular, it assesses the extent to which the outcome of any claim based on an implied term of the contract pre-determines any claim in restitution. In doing so, it analyses closely the recent decision of the Supreme Court in Barton v Morris and called into question the earlier decisions of the High Court of Australia in Roxborough v Rothmans, and of the Supreme Court in Barnes v Eastenders Cash & Carry.
Slavonic and Greek Bookmen in the Tenth-Century Balkans
Authors: Ivanova Mirela
Published: February 2024

Chapter 9 seeks to situate the new invention of the alphabet found in On Letters in wider contemporary intellectual currents. In On Letters, the matter of missionary activity is abandoned for a specific, scholarly debate about the history of language, and so the chapter poses to situate this text within an inward-looking, educated, monastic community. Amongst contemporary Slavonic texts and the available sigillographic and epigraphic evidence, the author’s position appears somewhat unusual. They seek to separate the bilingual milieu which was responsible for the production of the earliest Slavonic texts in the Balkans into Greek and Slavonic bookmen. That they seek to do so in such an aggressive fashion leads this chapter to posit that it is possible that some Slavonic speakers in the Balkans resisted the use of Slavonic literacy, and that this text reveals the earliest evidence of internal reluctance to adopt the new literacy.
Introduction
Authors: Crosthwaite Paul
Published: February 2024

The Introduction opens with a discussion of a celebrated 1905 US Supreme Court opinion, which provided one of the early twentieth century’s most enduringly influential characterizations of speculation. This statement, delivered by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., sought to lay to rest debates about speculation’s nature, significance, and legitimacy; yet in so doing, it pointed to many of the tensions, complexities, and contradictions that—as the book goes on to examine—persistently attended this pervasive but mercurial economic concept and practice. The Introduction next articulates Speculative Time’s topic, scope, and approach, before situating the book’s archive in relation to a notion of “speculative modernism” and explaining how the project takes its historical bearings from recent research that has restored the study of capitalism to a central role in the historiography of the United States (scholarship often loosely grouped under the banner of the “New History of Capitalism”). The Introduction is rounded off by summaries of the arguments of the book’s seven chapters and concluding Coda.
“Politics Was Something Like the Numbers Game”
Authors: Crosthwaite Paul
Published: February 2024

Chapter 6 explores how a desire among African Americans to become speculative subjects found expression in the variety of lottery gambling—overtly modeled on the stock market—known as the “numbers game” or “policy.” Not only is numbers play a recurrent feature of early to mid-twentieth-century African American fiction, but in major works by canonical Black authors this form of quasi-stock market speculation provides a highly adaptable model for reflections on the period’s political dreamers and visionaries. The chapter initially considers this paradigmatic manifestation of speculative futurity in Rudolph Fisher’s landmark work of Black detective fiction, The Conjure-Man Dies (1932). It next argues that in Claude McKay’s recently discovered Amiable with Big Teeth (2017), the numbers game simultaneously shapes a critique of utopian political movements and suggests the practical and pragmatic version of politics that the novel endorses. Turning to Richard Wright’s Lawd Today! (1963), the chapter argues that the systems of dream interpretation on which many policy players relied feed both into the novel’s attacks on political irrationalism and into its affirmation of forms of political analysis and action orientated towards unconscious fantasies and impulses. The final section shows how Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) places the numbers game at the center of its critical engagements with institutions and groups ranging from the US Constitution and the Christian Church to the Communist Party and the Black nationalist movement, as well as its endorsement of a version of Cold War liberalism infused with the ethos of speculative chance and risk.
The Rise and Fall of the Postwar Economy
Authors: Whittaker D. Hugh
Published: February 2024

Chapter 1 sets the baseline for assessing institutional change, with the rise and fall of Japan’s postwar economic model, built around manufacturing with a high degree of macro- and micro-level institutional and ideational coherence. Its success brought tensions and pressures for change in the 1980s which undermined the model’s coherence, with reform contested between advocates of incremental change, and those of more radical transformation. Neoliberal influences peaked in the early 2000s; their allure diminished with the dot.com bubble burst, Enron, growing domestic wealth disparities and ultimately the Global Financial Crisis. An initial attempt at digital and green transformation in the early 2000s faded through a lack of an integrating vision. Abenomics countered Japan’s deflationary tide but did not provide a new growth model. Out of the limelight of Abe’s policies, however, the beginnings of Japan’s current digital and green transformation were emerging.
Eco Cities, Smart Cities, and Super Cities
Authors: Whittaker D. Hugh
Published: February 2024

Cities have emerged as a critical stage for digital and green transformation. A wave of smart city projects has swept both the Global North and South, and Japan is no exception. Chapter 4 looks at the emergence and characteristics of smart city projects in Japan, from disparate energy and compact city projects in the 2000s, to eco cities, future cities, smart cities, and eventually ‘super cities’ which provide multiple services on an integrated data platform. A detailed, stage-by-stage Smart City Guidebook seeks to diffuse lessons within Japan, and abroad. Four diverse cases are introduced—Higashi Matsushima, Kashiwa-no-ha, Aizuwakamatsu, and Toyota’s Woven City. The chapter also introduces Japanese MaaS (mobility as a service) initiatives, as well as the Digital Garden City Nation concept.
Conclusion
Authors: Whittaker D. Hugh
Published: February 2024

The concluding chapter identifies three undercurrents or clusters of institutional change and associates each with a ‘spirit’ of capitalism: financialized capitalism; the new, adaptive developmental state; and communitarian capitalism. These pull in different directions. Optimistically, they may also be seen as being played off each other to create ‘controlled dis-equilibrium’ as a counter to institutional stasis. There are also tensions in innovation and innovation policy, between large firms and startups, technology-driven and social needs-oriented innovation, and between a reversion to a ‘catch-up’ stance and forging a post-catch-up path. Perhaps Japan will solve these tensions creatively. The chapter considers the claim that Society 5.0 will be ‘people-centred’, first in terms of becoming a ‘social investment state’, then in terms of an ‘anthropogenic mode of development’, and finally as a ‘digital democracy’. The chapter concludes with prospects of Japan developing a new socio-economic model.
Retirement System Resiliency in the Face of Real-World Shocks
Authors: Mitchell Olivia S. , Sabelhaus John , Utkus Stephen P.
Published: February 2024

Labor market shocks and financial stresses are shaping how older workers fare as they head into retirement, as well as how younger workers are preparing financially for their future. These shocks come on top of long-standing concerns surrounding increasing longevity and the adequacy and sustainability of public and private benefit systems. Drawing on exciting new datasets and the perspectives of seasoned as well as new researchers to the field, this volume explores how financial and labor markets, and social as well as private insurance programs, are driving the need for new policy to meet these challenges, along with the need for adaptive changes by households, in an effort to enhance retirement resilience.
Epilogue
Authors: Barnden Sally
Published: February 2024

The epilogue reflects on the book’s argument and considers its relationship to the present-day monarchy, highlighting instances of Shakespearean allusion in connection to the death of Elizabeth II and accession of Charles III. It considers the role of Shakespeare in mediating between contemporary monarchy and royal history, and queries whether Shakespeare can still function to secure the monarchy’s legitimacy and connection to its own history in a polarized twenty-first-century media environment. I conclude by suggesting that Charles III’s self-conscious identification with Shakespearean figures may mark the end of the relationship this book has explored between Shakespeare and the British monarchy.
Introduction: In and Out of Voltaire’s Closet
Authors: Wynn Thomas
Published: February 2024

An anecdote of Marmontel reading Voltaire’s spectacular tragedy Tancrède in 1760 alerts us to the complex practice of encountering plays in the closet in eighteenth-century France. Judging the play and simultaneously weeping over it, Marmontel shows that the closeted reading of plays encompasses judgement and emotion. Scholars have hitherto viewed reading and performance as distinct processes, associating reading with intellection and thereby obscuring more intemperate responses. Our view of eighteenth-century theatrical life must take into account not just the spectacular blockbusters at France’s most prestigious playhouse and the dramas performed in private, provincial and colonial theatres, but also readers’ multi-faceted encounters with plays. It is also necessary to consider how writers of the period created what is often termed ‘closet drama’, a genre of excess that cannot be accommodated within the practical, aesthetic, and ideological confines of playhouse.
The Enlightenment Closet
Authors: Wynn Thomas
Published: February 2024

This chapter assesses how the closet was understood in Enlightenment France when—as evidenced in theoretical writings, fiction, and correspondence alike—it emerged as the privileged site of reading plays. The chapter proposes the closet as a metaphor for thinking about judgement, independence, and disruption in the reading process. While the closet is routinely presented a space of calm reflection, this chapter takes insights from recent queer theory and a host of eighteenth-century texts including poems, architectural treatises, and memoirs, in order to reveal that room to be a private space whose uncertain boundaries are susceptible to penetration. By rejecting a Cartesian model of theatrical space that (ostensibly) privileges dichotomies of subject and object, and instead embracing the closet as a model of thinking about distance, interaction, and knowledge, this chapter bring into focus modes of reading and subjectivity that are open to disruption, immoderateness, and uncertainty.
Closeted Reading
Authors: Wynn Thomas
Published: February 2024

Dismantling the Aristotelean model whereby spectators and readers appreciate a play equally, this chapter explores the broader experiences and impacts of drama on paper and away from the playhouse. Eighteenth-century theorists and modern scholars alike routinely characterize the closeted reading of plays as sober, solitary, and judicious. Making extensive use of the period’s correspondences, testimonies, and marginalia, this section demonstrates that readers’ experiences were in fact more intemperate than such commentators advocate. Pro- and anti-theatrical writers of the period recognize the theatrical apparatus’s potential to limit and distort the audience’s cognitive responses. The closeted reader might thus have a greater critical appreciation of a text whilst, free from the coercive effects of the playhouse, also be at liberty to enjoy more passionate responses. The chapter proposes a conceptual model that more accurately reflects the mixed and multi-positional experience of reading plays in the period.
An articulated journal form
Authors: Reza Alexandra
Published: February 2024

This chapter argues that we should understand the significance of Mensagem and Présence Africaine not only in terms of the linguistic or literary merits of the individual texts they contain, but in terms of their polyphonic, comparative, and articulated form. It argues that both journals established a comparative, connective ontology in two key ways. The first was geographical, in bringing together writing from different places. The second was by bringing together ‘the literary’ and ‘the political’. Firstly, the chapter discusses the import of Mensagem’s editorial transnationalism, along with the importance of this in the context of the Salazarist lusotropicalism. The chapter then discusses the pan-African, sometimes tiermondiste, editorial logic of Présence Africaine, which wrote itself into a project of world transformation that crossed linguistic boundaries. Secondly, it turns to the connections the journals establish and interrogate between different spheres of social reality, and particularly between literature, society, and politics.
Women, work, and multiscalar anticolonialism
Authors: Reza Alexandra
Published: February 2024

Attending to the gendered divisions of literary labour that underpinned their production, this chapter argues that Mensagem and Présence Africaine offer a highly suggestive archive from which to bring forward women in (literary) anticolonial histories. It maintains that women were involved in the connective and articulated work the journals undertook, as translators and in other crucial paraliterary roles. The chapter discusses the work of Noémia de Sousa, Alda Espírito Santo, and Manuela Margarido in Portuguese, and in Présence Africaine, the work of writers such as Flora Nwapa and Rebecca Njau, as well as letters to the journal from different women. The chapter suggests that in these texts we see a call for a multiscalar anticolonial sensibility that writes gendered experience and the domestic space into anticolonial internationalism.
British Grand Strategy in the Age of American Hegemony
Authors: James William D.
Published: February 2024

Is the United Kingdom capable of grand strategy? Common wisdom suggests otherwise. Some think it implausible amid the maelstrom of domestic politics, while others believe the UK lacks the necessary autonomy, as a cog in the US-led order. British Grand Strategy in the Age of American Hegemony challenges these claims. William D. James contends that grand strategy is an unavoidable part of governing. Grand strategy is the highest level of national security decision-making, encompassing judgements over a state’s overarching objectives and interests, as well as its security environment and resource base. Getting these decisions ‘right’ is vital in moments of geopolitical flux. Employing several historical case studies between 1940 and 2003 and marshalling a host of primary sources, James argues that British politicians and officials have thought in grand strategic terms under American hegemony—even if they do not realize or admit to this. He also demonstrates that the role of allies in shaping British grand strategy has been overstated. Finally, James highlights the conditions under which domestic political actors can influence grand strategic decision-making. British Grand Strategy in the Age of American Hegemony not only contributes to the literature on the UK in the world but also to ideas and debates on grand strategy. James illustrates the value of deep, historical research on specific grand strategic decisions and offers an innovative framework of analysis, which could be applied more widely. Written for practitioners as well as scholars, the book concludes with several policy recommendations at this inflection point in British history.
The Law and Storytelling
Authors: Fish Stanley
Published: February 2024

Amistad turns on the questions of property law. To whom do the forty-four Africans shipwrecked on the coast of Connecticut belong? Do they belong to the Queen of Spain? Or to the salvagers who towed the ship into shore? Or to the two survivors of the rebellion that took the ship Amistad away from them? Or do they belong to themselves, as they would if they were free men and therefore no one’s property. In two trials and a Supreme Court hearing, these claims are debated against the background of a presidential election and fears of a civil war. The drama is complicated by a difficulty of communication: the Americans and the Africans speak different languages, and the linguistic distance remains even after a middle party—an interpreter—is found. While the court’s final verdict favors the Africans, their response is to sail away to a home country that is inhospitable, but is at least theirs.
Poetry Is Against the Law
Authors: Fish Stanley
Published: February 2024

Howl dramatizes the trial of bookseller and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti for having published Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem. Scenes from the trial alternate with scenes of the poem’s composition and its legendary performance by Ginsberg in a coffee shop. Inserted into the non-action—nothing really happens in the movie except for the verdict—are moments from a Time Magazine interview in which Ginsberg explains what poetry is and is not. His explanation acts as a commentary on the efforts of the prosecutor to pin down and stabilize the meaning of words and phrases in the poem. Those efforts are contrary to the medium of poetry as Ginsberg describes it, and their failure leads directly to the conclusion, where the judge declares that only Ginsberg has the right to pronounce on the meaning of his own words. Any objective basis for declaring the poem obscene is removed. What remains is the poem itself, which is cited, recited, and explicated so many times that the movie is finally, and primarily, a reading, in both senses of that word.
Locating Consent
Authors: Chakravarti Uma
Published: February 2024

This chapter locates the social and historical contexts of women’s choices in marriage in India, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explores the patriarchal dynamics of the endogamous marriage system among the traditional Hindu upper castes and its connections with the questions of status, power, honour, and property. The chapter examines the role of such marriages in maintaining the structures of production as well as reproduction of family, caste, and community. It shows how the colonial regime, invoking their ‘liberality’ as a demonstration of their superiority, brought in certain laws in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to address the women’s question. British legal policies introduced unprecedented tensions within the structure of marriage and reproduction; however, questions of marriage and consent were never centrally addressed but worked around, and the structures of reproduction remained undisturbed. There were reverberations that led to a more sustained interrogation of the system of marriage in the post-independence period. However, the age of consent for legal access to the female body has remained an explicit issue in the rape laws and an implicit question in marriages of choice in India even today. Moreover, both endogamous marriages that perpetuate the structures of production and reproduction as well as caste and its relationship to class and productive resources remain undisturbed by the constitutional and legal changes.
Margin(al) Maithili
Authors: Nath Pathak Dev
Published: February 2024

This chapter delves into the gendered nature of Maithili folklore in northeast Bihar. The goddess Ugratara engenders Maithili folklore at the cusp of Buddhism, tantra, and Hinduism. This chapter unearths the folklore related to the Hinduized Buddhist goddess to present a concrete case of the ironical marginalization of engendered Maithili lore. The goddess’s marginality unfolds at two levels. First, it is vulnerable to the socio-structural patriarchy in Maithil society dominated by the social hierarchy of the Shrotriya Brahmins. Second, the marginality is due to the contemporary social politics around the Ugratara festival that inserts an ideological–political cleansing. The chapter shows how contemporary orchestrations of the regional cultural heritage, centring on Bihar government-sponsored celebrations of the annual festival, Ugratara Mahotsav in Mahishi, Saharsa district, is detached from the complex and layered context of Maithili folklore and seeks to establish a qualitatively different regime of gender norms that repackage old stereotypes in a new milieu. It highlights how the origin myth of Ugratara sits comfortably with the folkloric polyphony of Mithila in which women are central agencies. Maithili folklore also underlines the predominant roles of female and ordinary folk. By contrast, the contemporary Ugratara Mahotsav marginalizes the folkloric polyphony, gendered peculiarities of the goddess, and fragments of the alternative narratives of the diverse caste groups. The chapter underscores how the coming together of the state, the dominant belief system, and a particular version of religion have transformed the engendered intersectionality of polyphonic Ugratara folklore into a monophonic majoritarian deity.
Reading sex in Amores 1.4 and 1.5
Authors: Ingleheart Jennifer
Published: February 2024

The practice of reading two elegies closely against each other has proved illuminating for the study of Ovid’s Amores. Often there are clear verbal links between paired elegies. Such pairs provide an implied narrative and dramatic sequence; they allow Ovid to explore elegiac affairs from more than one angle; they surprise and amuse the reader; they showcase Ovid’s skill at manipulating the same theme in different ways. This chapter develops scholarship on Ovidian paired poems by analysing two elegies that tend to be read in isolation but benefit from being read in conjunction: Amores 1.4 and 1.5. Although they do not follow a clear dramatic sequence, a narrative movement from one to the other is implied, and both have highly sexualized subject matter. The first instructs an unnamed female beloved on how to conduct herself at a conuiuium that she will attend with her uir, looks to Ovid’s past sexual exploits with this woman, and ends by telling her that she should be sexually unresponsive to her uir when she leaves to spend the night with him. The much-studied 1.5 relates how Corinna, here named for the first time in the collection, visits Ovid for daytime sex. Ingleheart argues that reading the poems as a pair provides insights into the narrative dynamics of the first book of the Amores, as well as into Ovid’s construction and control of his readership. Moreover, taken closely together, Amores 1.4 and 1.5 can inform our understanding of Ovidian elegiac erotics and style.
Closing time
Authors: Gibson Bruce
Published: February 2024

This chapter looks at the final book of Ovid’s exile poetry, in assessing the nature of Ovid’s farewell to elegy. Ex Ponto 4.16, presented as an utterance from Ovid after death, has inevitably shaped approaches to Ex Ponto 4, but this chapter will show that there are other aspects to the closure that Ovid creates in the second half of this final book of elegies. The chapter begins by considering the significance of Sextus Pompeius, the consul of ad 14, as a way of reflecting on the change of emperor from Augustus to Tiberius, and as a figure who himself is associated with the kind of gratitude from Ovid which might properly be owed to an emperor. Praise of members of the imperial family in Ex Ponto 4 turns out to be something which is limited in coverage, and indeed treated most extensively only in a description of Ovid’s poem composed in the Getic language (Ex Ponto 4.13). A similar kind of transformation is also evident in the way in which Ex Ponto 4.14 revisits the theme from Ovid’s earlier exile poetry of the harm done to him by his own poetry, but shifts the focus from imperial anger to the possibility of giving offence to his hosts in Tomis. Even though the exile poetry as a whole has a tendency to self-characterization in terms of repetition and endless complaints, Ex Ponto 4 paradoxically suggests new directions for Ovid’s poetry even as his life draws to a close.
Talking heads, talking statues
Authors: Dixon Helen M.
Published: February 2024

This chapter presents the first edition and commentary of a fifteenth-century Latin elegiac poem by Pompeo Pazzaglia on the Roman Pantheon and a prophecy by its supposed ‘presiding deity’, the goddess Cybele, about the arrival of a second Aeneas who will transform Rome from a Christian city back to a ‘pagan’ one. Exploration of textual detail, historical context and intertextual interpretation, involving a wide range of ancient authors, as well as medieval traditions (e.g. the Mirabilia Vrbis Romae) and contemporary accounts of the physical state of ancient Rome by Biondo Flavio, Poggio, and Leon Battista Alberti, leads to larger questions about Christianity and paganism, and attitudes towards a looming Ottoman invasion of Europe. The rough versification of the poem leaves some questions about grammatical construction and interpretation difficult to resolve.
Recalcitrant Desires in Addiction
Authors: Burdman Federico
Published: February 2024

This paper argues that the crucial feature of the drug-related desires experienced by addicted agents is not that they “push” the agent with a force she cannot oppose, but that they are not easily undermined by things that normally have the ability to undermine desires—in other words, that they are extraordinarily recalcitrant. As a result, the disposition to experience these desires is very persistent over the long-term, manifesting itself in particular episodes of wanting to use drugs that recur with great frequency. Both the persistence and the recurrence of these desires, it is argued, contribute to a diminished ability to respond to relevant reasons that speak against drug use.
Negligence and Self-Trust
Authors: Murray Samuel
Published: February 2024

Why are we accountable for negligent wrongdoing? This chapter develops a contractualist account of accountability for negligent wrongdoing rooted in maintaining self-trust. Displays of negligence threaten the self-trust needed to exercise planning agency. People thus have reason to take responsibility for being negligent to defeat higher-order evidence about the unreliability of one’s planning agency. Individuals are rationally required to take responsibility for negligence in virtue of the demands of planning agency. One novel implication of this view is that taking responsibility for negligence grounds our holding others responsible for negligence.
On Having the Status “Responsible Person”
Authors: Calhoun Cheshire
Published: February 2024

Taking a practice-based approach to responsibility, we might ask, “What conception of the default status ‘responsible person’ is presupposed by the structure of social practices?” The chapter argues that social practices presume that responsible persons are, first, capable of living up to normative expectations—they are accountability responsible; second, they are in fact disposed to satisfy minimal normative expectations—they are compliance responsible; and, third, they are both capable of taking, and disposed to at least sometimes take, responsibility for promoting goods in ways they are not obligated to do—they are responsibility takers.
The Risks (and Powers) of Praise
Authors: Bingeman Emily
Published: February 2024

This chapter argues that a common assumption of risk asymmetry about praise and blame is mistaken. I argue that either the risk asymmetry is not as pronounced as is commonly assumed (modest conclusion) or that the risks of praise and blame are roughly symmetrical (ambitious conclusion). I begin by detailing what I take to be the content of the risk asymmetry assumption and argue that the prevalence of this assumption arguably enhances the moral riskiness of praise. Next, I briefly outline the understanding of praise that I am working with and then, building on first person testimony and recent work in philosophy and psychology, I develop a series of examples of the ways in which praise can be morally risky. Finally, I consider how praise can be empowering and liberatory for some of the same reasons that it can be problematic—because it has the ability to interact with and change our norms and hermeneutical structures. I add an important caution about how moral missteps can easily happen in attempts at liberatory praise as well.
The Reflectivist Approach
Authors: Boyle Matthew
Published: February 2024

In this chapter, the author argues that only a “reflectivist” account of transparency can meet the conditions identified in the previous chapter, and that one can find the materials for constructing such an account in some neglected ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre. On the resulting, Sartre-inspired approach to the Problem of Transparency, one’s entitlement to treat questions about one’s own mental states as transparent to questions about the non-mental world depends on the presence, in one’s first-order awareness of the non-mental world, of a form of implicit or “nonpositional” self-awareness, whose presence enables one to make explicit psychological self-ascriptions through mere reflection. The author shows how such nonpositional self-awareness is present in first-order intention, perception, and belief, and gives a preliminary account of how reflection can transform nonpositional self-awareness into explicit, “positional” self-knowledge.
Reflection and Rationality
Authors: Boyle Matthew
Published: February 2024

This chapter examines the crucial notion of reflection: the activity by which one can move from an implicit, non-conceptualized awareness of one’s own mental states to an explicit, conceptual knowledge of these states. A venerable philosophical tradition sees a close connection between the capacity for reflective awareness of one’s own mental states and general rationality. The author argues that, in order to understand this link between rationality and reflection on one’s own mental states, one must first appreciate a more general link between rationality and the capacity reflectively to transform an understanding exercised in applying rules in first-order thinking into an understanding of these rules themselves. The author illustrates this point by reference to some famous problems about inference, and goes on to show how the point can be brought to bear in dissolving various puzzles about the nature of reflection.
The Examined Life
Authors: Boyle Matthew
Published: February 2024

If there is a kind of implicit self-awareness that necessarily informs first-order mental states, then it is natural to ask why the step to explicit self-knowledge matters—why it is valuable for people actually to reflect on their own thought and choices. This chapter argues that one can understand the value of self-knowledge only if one recognizes how reflection can transform the character of a person’s first-order knowing and acting, rather than merely supplying further information relevant to the management of such first-order activities. The author argues that this observation help to clarify why self-knowledge might be thought to represent a problem for human beings in a way that it does not for nonrational animals, and so why the Delphic injunction to “Know thyself” can claim to state, not just an arbitrary demand made by some ancient deity, but a necessary and proper task in a human life.
Gendering the History of the Labor Movement
Authors: Hammad Hanan
Published: February 2024

Gender matters to labor history and labor matters to gender history. This chapter aims to gender the history of the Egyptian labor movement by tracing the origin and development of women’s labor activism in the interwar period and examining women’s experiences in proletarianization, or dependency on the sale of labor power for survival. It attempts to illuminate how gender shaped working-class activism by counting the emotional, social, economic, and political labors shouldered by women to sustain the labor movement and male activists. Women in workers’ families creatively employed gendered traditions to win public awareness and sympathy for their causes. Their practices highlight working-class women’s immense contributions to labor history and how their gendered practices enhanced their activism rather than presenting barriers to it.
Refashioning the Shari‘a Courts in the Semi-colonial Period
Authors: Kholoussy Hanan
Published: February 2024

This paper uses the recently unearthed Egyptian court registers of the revamped Islamic religious (shari‘a) legal system to explore the ways in which men and women understood their legal rights and duties in marriage, divorce, and the family during a wave of legal reforms between 1897 and 1931. It examines a sample of personal status cases filed in the Cairo Shari‘a Court in order to situate them within the widespread press debates over the role the completely reorganized and revamped—albeit more bureaucratized and hierarchical—Islamic courts should play. This paper argues that they resulted in a comprehensive transformation that centralized, formalized, and enlarged the role these courts played in the familial and national lives of Egyptians. This paper not only reflects on the use of shari‘a records as a source for both legal and social history but also argues that scholars of the courts must transcend the theoretical and methodological divide between academic works that rely primarily on periodicals, and hence marginalize the illiterate masses, and those that make use of court records and rarely situate their litigants and personnel beyond the walls of the courtroom. By merging court records with press sources, this paper aims to produce a more nuanced conceptualization of early twentieth-century Egyptian history while also demonstrating discrepancies as well as convergences between legal practices and social perceptions of marriage and family, on the one hand, and the law, the courts, and the state, on the other hand.
Rethinking the Greeks of Egypt
Authors: Gorman Anthony
Published: February 2024

The Greeks were the largest of the ethnic communities resident in Egypt during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The product of extensive migration from Greece and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Greeks of Egypt came to occupy a significant place in Egyptian society, being represented across a wide spectrum of occupations from the working class to the professional classes and wealthy bourgeoisie, living in different parts of the country, and adopting a range of political and cultural positions. Despite this diversity, their presence has generally been understood in the literature in largely collective terms, whether as a European colony, a diasporic national community, or a foreign minority. This chapter seeks to critique this homogenizing perspective by exploring the lives of three Egyptian Greek individuals who were active during the first half of the twentieth century. The cases of Apostolos Skouphopoulos, labor leader, local councilor, and man of letters in Port Said; Giorgis Dimou, artist, writer, communist, and pro-peace campaigner in Cairo; and Semele Tsotsou of Alexandria, women’s activist and teacher of the deaf in Alexandria, demonstrate the complex and embedded character of Greek life in multiethnic Egyptian society. Their personal trajectories suggest our understanding not only of Egyptian Greek life but of that of other ethnic of national groups should not be limited within the confines of a particular community but should also be understood within a broader political, social, and economic canvas.
Rethinking Literacy during the Nahda
Authors: Yousef Hoda A.
Published: February 2024

This chapter uses methodological approaches from the field of literacy studies to explore nahda texts and literacies as situated, contextual practices engaged in by a wide variety of Egyptians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This approach stems from the notion that literacies (in the plural) are practices—some oral, some written—that could be pursued by anyone, regardless of a person’s ability to read or write. Likewise, textual sources themselves had “many lives” as one locale within larger networks of textual interactions that served diverse audiences. From this vantage point, this chapter uses handwritten petitions as a case study to trace how texts were deployed throughout Egyptian society, well beyond the literate elite. Sources such as these petitions—which sat at the nexus of the oral and written—can be particularly helpful as we investigate the complex negotiations underway in the modern period, as more people became interested in social reforms, economic advancement, and political movements. When we also incorporate an awareness of the roles that women, working classes, and rural communities played in textual practices, we can trace how ideas not only filtered through society but also were adapted to new uses along the way.
Colonizing and Decolonizing Egyptian Medicine
Authors: Bayoumi Soha
Published: February 2024

The story of colonizing and decolonizing medicine in Egypt is a story of how the vagaries of power have translated into different configurations for the practice of medicine: from the rise of state medicine with the inception of the Egyptian modern state to the ultimate collapse of said medicine with the neoliberal turn in the 1970s and beyond. Relying on a combination of primary and secondary sources and oral history interviews, this chapter traces the trajectory of modern medicine in Egypt and explores how medicine has served, on the one hand, as a tool of biopower and social control, and, on the other, as a site for claims-making and a tool of resistance to abuses of power. It argues that medicine represents what has been described as “an assemblage of colonial modernity”—a site that combines colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial anxieties that reflect the tensions between the local and the global, the national and the international, and the particular and the universal. Through a brief exploration of several topics in the history of modern medicine in Egypt, from the categorization of diseases to medical professionalization, and from the place of race and gender in the medical establishment to the political instrumentalization of medicine and the social and political roles of doctors, this chapter explores some of the manifestations of the circuitous trajectory of colonization and decolonization in Egyptian medicine and invites further scholarly focus on these topics.
African American Film History Beyond Cinema
Authors: Field Allyson Nadia
Published: February 2024

This chapter approaches William Foster, one of the first African Americans to produce motion pictures, through an intermedial lens, attentive to the interrelated performance milieux of popular theater and cinema in the early twentieth century. Foster’s career demonstrates how, for Black popular culture, valences of representation were contingent on the context of performance and reception. The dynamics of race, performance, and audience shaped the Black theatrical world of the end of the nineteenth century—and, in turn, informed the emerging Black cinematic landscape of the early twentieth. Foster played a crucial role in this transition and through him we gain insight into Black theatrical ambitions at a time rife with possibilities for African American creative workers, even while they were stymied by the entrenched racism of the broader culture.