bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Metabolite profiling of human renal cell carcinoma reveals tissue-origin dominance in nutrient availability
Authors: Abbott Keene L , Ali Ahmed , Reinfeld Bradley I , Deik Amy , Subudhi Sonu , Landis Madelyn D , Hongo Rachel A , Young Kirsten L , Kunchok Tenzin , Nabel Christopher S , Crowder Kayla D , Kent Johnathan R , Madariaga Maria Lucia L , Jain Rakesh K , Beckermann Kathryn E , Lewis Caroline A , Clish Clary B , Muir Alexander , Rathmell W Kimryn , Rathmell Jeffrey , Vander Heiden Matthew G
Published: May 2024

The tumor microenvironment is a determinant of cancer progression and therapeutic efficacy, with nutrient availability playing an important role. Although it is established that the local abundance of specific nutrients defines the metabolic parameters for tumor growth, the factors guiding nutrient availability in tumor compared to normal tissue and blood remain poorly understood. To define these factors in renal cell carcinoma (RCC), we performed quantitative metabolomic and comprehensive lipidomic analyses of tumor interstitial fluid (TIF), adjacent normal kidney interstitial fluid (KIF), and plasma samples collected from patients. TIF nutrient composition closely resembles KIF, suggesting that tissue-specific factors unrelated to the presence of cancer exert a stronger influence on nutrient levels than tumor-driven alterations. Notably, select metabolite changes consistent with known features of RCC metabolism are found in RCC TIF, while glucose levels in TIF are not depleted to levels that are lower than those found in KIF. These findings inform tissue nutrient dynamics in RCC, highlighting a dominant role of non-cancer-driven tissue factors in shaping nutrient availability in these tumors.
Structural analysis of the dynamic ribosome-translocon complex
Authors: Lewis Aaron J. O. , Zhong Frank , Keenan Robert J. , Hegde Ramanujan S.
Published: May 2024

The protein translocon at the endoplasmic reticulum comprises the Sec61 translocation channel and numerous accessory factors that collectively facilitate the biogenesis of secretory and membrane proteins. Here, we leveraged recent advances in cryo-EM and structure prediction to derive insights into several novel configurations of the ribosome-translocon complex. We show how a transmembrane domain (TMD) in a looped configuration passes through the Sec61 lateral gate during membrane insertion; how a nascent chain can bind and constrain the conformation of ribosomal protein uL22; and how the translocon-associated protein (TRAP) complex can adjust its position during different stages of protein biogenesis. Most unexpectedly, we find that a large proportion of translocon complexes contains RAMP4 intercalated into Sec61’s lateral gate, widening Sec61’s central pore and contributing to its hydrophilic interior. These structures lead to mechanistic hypotheses for translocon function and highlight a remarkably plastic machinery whose conformations and composition adjust dynamically to its diverse range of substrates.
Amoeboid cells undergo durotaxis with soft end polarized NMIIA
Authors: Kang Chenlu , Chen Pengcheng , Yi Xin , Li Dong , Hu Yiping , Yang Yihong , Cai Huaqing , Li Bo , Wu Congying
Published: May 2024

Cell migration towards stiff substrates has been coined as durotaxis and implicated in development, wound healing and cancer, where complex interplays between immune and non-immune cells are present. Compared to the emerging mechanisms underlying the strongly adhesive mesenchymal durotaxis, little is known about whether immune cells - migrating in amoeboid mode - could follow mechanical cues. Here we develop an imaging-based confined migration device with stiffness gradient. By tracking live cell trajectory and analyzing the directionality of T cells and neutrophils, we observe that amoeboid cells can durotax. We further delineate the underlying mechanism to involve non-muscle myosin IIA (NMIIA) polarization towards the soft-matrix-side but may not require differential actin flow up-or down-stiffness gradient. Using the protista
Dictyostelium
, we demonstrate the evolutionary conservation of amoeboid durotaxis. Finally, these experimental phenomena are theoretically captured by an active gel model capable of mechanosensing. Collectively, these results may shed new lights on immune surveillance and recently identified confined migration of cancer cells, within the mechanically inhomogeneous tumor microenvironment or the inflamed fibrotic tissues.
Dysregulated Ca2+ signaling, fluid secretion, and mitochondrial function in a mouse model of early Sjögren’s disease
Authors: Huang Kai-Ting , Wagner Larry E , Takano Takahiro , Lin Xiao-Xuan , Bagavant Harini , Deshmukh Umesh , Yule David I
Published: May 2024

The molecular mechanisms leading to saliva secretion are largely established, but factors that underlie secretory hypofunction, specifically related to the autoimmune disease Sjögren’s syndrome (SS) are not fully understood. A major conundrum is the lack of association between the severity of salivary gland immune cell infiltration and glandular hypofunction. SS-like disease was induced by treatment with DMXAA, a small molecule agonist of murine STING. We have previously shown that the extent of salivary secretion is correlated with the magnitude of intracellular Ca2+ signals (Takano et al., 2021). Contrary to our expectations, despite a significant reduction in fluid secretion, neural stimulation resulted in enhanced Ca2+ signals with altered spatiotemporal characteristics in vivo. Muscarinic stimulation resulted in reduced activation of the Ca2+-activated Cl- channel, TMEM16a, although there were no changes in channel abundance or absolute sensitivity to Ca2+. Super-resolution microscopy revealed a disruption in the colocalization of Inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate receptor Ca2+ release channels with TMEM16a, and channel activation was reduced when intracellular Ca2+ buffering was increased. These data indicate altered local peripheral coupling between the channels. Appropriate Ca2+ signaling is also pivotal for mitochondrial morphology and bioenergetics. Disrupted mitochondrial morphology and reduced oxygen consumption rate were observed in DMXAA-treated animals. In summary, early in SS disease, dysregulated Ca2+ signals lead to decreased fluid secretion and disrupted mitochondrial function contributing to salivary gland hypofunction.
Robust single-nucleus RNA sequencing reveals depot-specific cell population dynamics in adipose tissue remodeling during obesity
Authors: So Jisun , Strobel Olivia , Wann Jamie , Kim Kyungchan , Paul Avishek , Acri Dominic J , Dabin Luke C , Kim Jungsu , Peng Gang , Roh Hyun Cheol
Published: May 2024

Single-nucleus RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq), an alternative to single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), encounters technical challenges in obtaining high-quality nuclei and RNA, persistently hindering its applications. Here, we present a robust technique for isolating nuclei across various tissue types, remarkably enhancing snRNA-seq data quality. Employing this approach, we comprehensively characterize the depot-dependent cellular dynamics of various cell types underlying mouse adipose tissue remodeling during obesity. By integrating bulk nuclear RNA-seq from adipocyte nuclei of different sizes, we identify distinct adipocyte subpopulations categorized by size and functionality. These subpopulations follow two divergent trajectories, adaptive and pathological, with their prevalence varying by depot. Specifically, we identify a key molecular feature of dysfunctional hypertrophic adipocytes, a global shutdown in gene expression, along with elevated stress and inflammatory responses. Furthermore, our differential gene expression analysis reveals distinct contributions of adipocyte subpopulations to the overall pathophysiology of adipose tissue. Our study establishes a robust snRNA-seq method, providing novel insights into the biological processes involved in adipose tissue remodeling during obesity, with broader applicability across diverse biological systems.
The Ethics of Narrative
Authors: White Hayden , Bal Mieke
Published: May 2024

This book brings together nearly all of the author's uncollected essays from the last two decades of his life, revealing a lesser-known side: that of the public intellectual. From modern patriotism and European identity to Hannah Arendt's writings on totalitarianism, from the idea of the historical museum and the theme of melancholy in art history to trenchant readings of Leo Tolstoy and Primo Levi, the first volume of the book shows the author at his most engaging, topical, and capacious. Introduced by the editor, who explains the major themes, sources, and frames of reference of the author's thought, the volume features five previously unpublished lectures, as well as more complete versions of several published essays, thereby giving the reader unique access to the author's late thought. In addition to historical theorists and intellectual historians, the book will appeal to students and scholars across the humanities in such fields as literary and cultural studies, art history and visual studies, and media studies.
The Elements of Totalitarianism
Authors: White Hayden
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines The Origins of Totalitarianism written by Hannah Arendt. It notes how Arendt contrived a distinctively modernist view of historical reality that made it difficult for her to come to terms with her insights into the nature and future of totalitarianism itself. Moreover, for Arendt, historiography is identifiable by its narrative form, its this-worldly interest or focus, and its resistance to any transcendentalizing impulse. The chapter also explains the theme of crystallization within Arendt's works in line with the nature of history and the relation between the prehistory and history of totalitarianism. It cites that Arendt's perspective on historical events is akin to an artwork that has a subject matter and a truth content.
Historicality as a Trope of Political Discourse
Authors: White Hayden
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides an overview of historicality as a trope of political discourse. It details the relationship of history with the notions of rhetoric, ethics, and politics. Rhetoric, ethics, and politics all have to do with exchange while being viewed in terms of the others as ends–means relations, subject–object relations, or seducer–seducee relations. The discipline of history is a practice where various other, auxiliary disciplines devoted to the establishment of the facts of the past are used to construct a record of what happened in the past of a given community or group. Moreover, the term “historicality” traditionally served as a trope by which to relativize ethical and political questions.
Religious Appeals in a Middle East Rivalry
Authors: Henne Peter S.
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses Saudi Arabia's efforts to form an Islamic Pact as part of its 1960s rivalry with Egypt. It begins by looking at the high moral authority of religion in Saudi politics and the ideologically charged nature of the rivalry with Egypt. The chapter then provides evidence that Saudi Arabia deployed religious appeals as a serious and strategic tool in its power politics. It considers the conditions affecting the appeals' impact: Saudi Arabia's credibility on Islamic issues and the material disincentives of target states to join its Islamic Pact. This limited the ability of Saudi Arabia to form a durable coalition, but it did disrupt regional relations, unsettling Egypt and worrying the United States.
US Religious Engagement in the Global War on Terrorism
Authors: Henne Peter S.
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines United States' use of religious engagement to build international coalitions as part of its global war on terrorism. Like Saudi Arabia, religion has a high moral authority in the United States, playing an important part in American politics even if it is officially secular. The global war on terrorism—the US response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks—was likewise an ideologically charged crisis, in which al-Qaeda attempted to mobilize Muslims against US dominance, and the United States appealed to common values—including shared “moderate” religiosity—to create a countervailing coalition. The chapter demonstrates that these led the United States to adopt religious appeals as part of its effort to mobilize states and societies against al-Qaeda. The United States' credibility on “moderate Islam” and engagement with Muslims was often limited, but Muslim states and social groups faced material incentives to work with the United States. Convenient coalitions thus formed; some deeper connections emerged, but many of the interactions were stymied by the United States losing control of the religious narrative and its general unfamiliarity with the religious policies it proposed.
Survival
Authors: Horsti Karina
Published: May 2024

This chapter goes deeper into the process of survival through analyzing interviews with those who survived the Lampedusa disaster on October 13, 2023. It discusses what survival means for the survivors and how some of them draw on the legacy of the victims to actively and ethically participate in the world. It also examines mediated experiences of survival in literature and film. For example, when border crossers return to Lampedusa, the place where their state of survival started, they make visible how survivors have proceeded from the position of victim by actively participating in the world around them. The chapter emphasizes how the investigation of the survivors' testimonies will show how the position of a survivor from which one can make public acts of citizenship is not necessarily a certain or permanent condition.
Introduction
Authors: Baggett Holly A.
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides a background on Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, who became arbiters of twentieth-century modernism. It details what propelled Anderson and Heap from their parochial origins into experimental art, radical politics, and lives of personal liberation in the avant-garde circles of Chicago, Greenwich Village, and Paris. It also explores how Anderson and Heap's interest in modernism paved the way for their lifelong immersion in the opaque, complex, and largely misunderstood esoteric philosophy of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. The chapter focuses on a facet of modernism that until recently has been neglected, which is the role that Western esotericism played in modernism.
Women and the National Park Service
Authors: Hart Judy
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the question of why fewer than 1 percent of the 318 National Park units and roughly 1,500 designated National Historic Landmarks commemorated the history of American women. It addresses why the nationally important women's rights sites in Seneca Falls had not become a national park until 1980. The reluctance to provide equal treatment to women was also reflected in the lack of appointments of women to leadership positions. The chapter looks at the perspective on the exclusion of women in the Park Service, which is expressed in the history of uniforms for women rangers and how they supported the discrimination against women rangers. The argument about whether the Park Service should only commemorate the triumphs of America was replaced with a new understanding of the role of the Park Service in interpreting American history.
Liftoff for the Park
Authors: Hart Judy
Published: May 2024

This chapter details how President Jimmy Carter signed the legislation enacted by Congress on December 28, 1980, to create the Women's Rights National Historical Park. The agreement for the Park Service to purchase the Stanton house from Ralph Peters dissolved when Secretary James Watt announced a prohibition against purchasing any property. The chapter talks about Herb Cables, who was officially appointed the new regional director for the National Park Service in Boston on January 24, 1982, and enthusiastically supported the Women's Rights Park on women's history. The chapter emphasizes how the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment would have led to demands to interpret the contemporary and controversial campaign for the Economic Research Associates (ERA). Local organizations that had supported the legislation on the Women's Rights Park expected that the park would open in 1982 during Convention Days.
Introduction
Authors: Godine Amy
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides a background on Gerrit Smith's donation of three thousand Adirondack gift lots, which got land into the hands of Black New Yorkers. It discusses how Smith's donation of land expressed romantic notions about spiritual regeneration and a conviction that the only hope for Black New Yorkers was to leave urban life behind. It also mentions adviser-scouts who kept Smith informed about the rampant Negro-phobia in metropolitan New York that crushed any hope of Black economic gain. The chapter looks at hints and rumbles of dissatisfaction with Smith's plan from Black activists outside his inner ring of confidantes. Grantees saw Smith's scattering of gift lots as a recipe for social isolation and insecurity.
Theories into Practice
Authors: Godine Amy
Published: May 2024

This chapter talks about a blacksmith who griped that the barber James Duffin, Gerrit Smith's Black agent in Geneva, played favorites. An Albany woman asked Smith to consider giving farms to Black women who must contend not only with prejudice against her poverty and color, but prejudice against her sex. The chapter describes a fever in New York City among the colored people to get homesteads and start farming, hoping Smith would sell land near the gift lot of Dr. James McCune Smith. It then details how decades of long-distance land management had readied Smith for pushback and finagling. A few years after the giveaway, Smith donated more acreage to a thousand poor white New Yorkers, including women.
On Fat Lands under Genial Suns
Authors: Godine Amy
Published: May 2024

This chapter recounts how Gerrit Smith bought an eighteen-thousand-acre upland tract in Tug Hill, Oneida County, to the west of the Adirondacks in what had been the hunting territory of the Iroquois in 1818. In 1846 and 1847, Smith parceled out Florence lots to two dozen Black grantees. The chapter describes a Black settlement in Florence as a town that was already mapped and tamed and was all wrong for what Smith had in mind as it was too done and too “found.” The chapter then addresses why Smith had not made Stephen Myers a land agent, noting that the Albanian man made him uneasy. In the name of an impartial inclusivity, Smith still made Myers a giftee, giving the Albanian a thirty-seven-acre lot in Florence.
The Second Wave
Authors: Godine Amy
Published: May 2024

This chapter details how Gerrit Smith's plan designed to draw three thousand Black New Yorkers north had failed to attract more than a fraction three years after he published his intentions. Smith, along with Dr. McCune Smith and Elder Ray, envisioned a thoroughgoing outmigration of Black families to the wilderness. The chapter talks about William P. Powell, the proprietor of Manhattan's Colored Sailor's Home, who urged Black seamen to try Adirondack farming. The chapter then recounts how McCune Smith and Powell met Black settlers at a prayer meeting at the North Elba inn and home of the venerable pioneer “good old Deacon Osgood.” It also includes Lyman Eppes from Troy, who had brought his clan to land just south of North Elba and whose name and family would dominate reports of the Black Woods for another hundred years.
White Memory, Black Memory
Authors: Godine Amy
Published: May 2024

This chapter talks about Seneca Ray Stoddard and his books and postcards, tinted maps, humorous sketches, and travel guides, who introduced the United States to the Adirondack region and defined its brand and image. It highlights what Glens Falls master-influencer had to say about the late John Brown and Gerrit Smith's scheme of justice and benevolence. Modern chroniclers of Timbuctoo held Alfred Donaldson to blame for the casually racist portrait of the Black pioneers. The chapter mentions the upstate Democratic legislator Winslow C. Watson, who judged Gerrit Smith's scheme doomed because its giftees were inherently undeserving. It recounts Gerrit Smith's two months in the Utica Asylum, which gave his critics a perfect opening to discount his philanthropic work for Black New Yorkers as evidence of mental illness.
Introduction
Authors: Lazarski Christopher
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Lord Acton and his ideas about liberty. Acton, especially in his youth, was attracted by a variety of interests and wrote on many unrelated topics. Liberty, however, always played an important role in his writings, even if originally as a point of reference rather than a topic. Gradually it emerged as his principal passion, greater than any other theme or interest. Acton was an ardent liberal who virtually identified the cause of liberty with that of liberalism. He also wrote hundreds of essays, all of which include general views and observations relating to power, the state, democracy, liberalism, citizenship, and religion. Ultimately, Acton's writings allow us to better understand what makes the individual and society free or unfree, what makes the state and its regime friendly or unfriendly to civil society, and what makes us either citizens or subjects.
Why D308?
Authors: Leach Elizabeth Eva
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the correlation between the culture of song in western Europe in the decades around 1300 and the intimate lives of medieval aristocrats. Manuscript D308's overlap with the more central cultural productions of the French-speaking west of Europe is complicated by its significant placement on a linguistic and political borderland in Lotharingia. Moreover, the contents show concerns that both reinforce a sense of cultural norms and evidence of local accommodation. The Song Collection exhibits a remarkable range of genres, a thorough compendium of the French lyric genres set to music in the thirteenth century. Meanwhile, Chauvency serves as evidence of performance practice and the importance and use of many lyric genres, while offering suggestive connections between music, fantasy, pleasure, and violence.
Introduction
Authors: Cooper David L.
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter tackles the phenomenon and significance of Czech manuscripts, which include the Queen's Court and Green Mountain Manuscripts. In the second decade of the nineteenth century, the Czech national movement was entering into a new phase wherein they saw language as the primary sign reflecting national cultural identity. For over a century, the Czech language had fallen into disuse as a language of culture due to the particular linguistic politics of the Counter-Reformation in the Czech lands. The chapter notes that the Czech forged manuscripts were one of the longest-lived romantic literary forgeries. The manuscripts modeled Czech poetic practice and patriotic behavior and won converts to the Czech national cause.
Forgery as a Romantic Form of Authorship
Authors: Cooper David L.
Published: May 2024

This chapter looks into forgery as a romantic form of authorship. It examines the notion of seeing forgery as a regular part of the literary process, maybe even as essential to literature. However, seeing forgery as an aspect of romantic creativity and literary practice meant considering the key concepts of authenticity, originality, and simulation. The chapter elaborates on how the anonymity of collective authorship and authority is reflected profoundly in the epic battle scenes of the Czech manuscripts. It also explains how the case of Czech manuscripts offered explosive confrontations regarding the perspectives on the same values of originality and authenticity.
Resource Nationalism in Patronage Democracies
Authors: Warburton Eve
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines an analytical framework concerned with resource nationalism in patronage democracies such as Indonesia. It considers domestic businesses as a major force in determining the trajectory of land and resource policy in competitive patronage democracies. Resource nationalism as an economic policy intervention emerges via struggles between a range of interest groups. The chapter discusses the notion of resource nationalism that allows for a form of localization and nationalization driven by private domestic interests. In Indonesia, some of the major proponents of resource nationalism were domestic resource companies with little internationalization and superior instrumental power, who saw state protection and privilege as the primary means of business growth.
State Capital and Constraints on Private Power
Authors: Warburton Eve
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the constraints on private power. It discusses the case of the 2001 Oil and Gas Law wherein competing interests between rising private businesses and the sector's major state-owned enterprise, Pertamina, generated nationalist tensions and legal ambiguity. In the oil and gas sector, competing nationalist visions from the major state-owned companies and rising private domestic firms produced extended policy conflict over the terms of a new sectoral law. The chapter mentions that Pertamina's efforts to enshrine in law a first right of refusal to these foreign contracts largely failed. It also explains that the post-New Order political economy created new and more favorable conditions for nationalist change.
Crisis and Choices
Authors: Martin-Nielsen Janet
Published: May 2024

This chapter looks at the budgetary and management problems, compounded by intragovernmental disputes and economic crisis that threw France's commitment to its Antarctic territory into crisis. The fundamental national interest of retaining Terre Adélie was openly questioned at high political levels as the strategic and political advantages the territory offered to France were hard to explain in concrete terms. The chapter discusses the onerous cost of chartering ships to service France's Antarctic and sub-Antarctic districts, causing French scientists to struggle to work in the Antarctic. By 1979, well over half of the Terres australes et antarctiques françaises' (TAAF) budget went to leasing the French-owned Marion Dufresne to service the sub-Antarctic islands and the Danish Thala Dan to service Terre Adélie. The chapter emphasizes how TAAF's oceanographic campaigns had to be canceled for lack of money as TAAF was in serious financial trouble by the late 1970s.
Introduction
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the theories of liberalism. It provides a background on the first comprehensive survey of Russian liberalism from its origins in the late eighteenth century through to the present day. Liberalism is an ideology, a political movement, and a set of cultural, political, and economic practices aimed at maximizing personal potential by putting into effect a distinct set of values through a distinct set of institutions. The chapter considers Russia as one of the most important players said to be challenging liberalism's global dominance. While Western leaders portray themselves as representing the forces of liberalism and democracy against conservatism and autocracy, their Russian counterparts pose as the champions of an alternative to the Western-led liberal world order.
Russian Liberalism under Putin
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter emphasizes how liberalism remained a powerful political force in Russia in 2000, but it has become almost extinguished several decades later. Under Vladimir Putin, the economic reforms of the 1990s began to show some benefits and a sharp rise in the global price of oil filled the government's coffers, producing an economic boom that lasted nearly a decade. Putin restored Moscow's control over the regions and purged the oligarchs, making his popularity soar as order and prosperity returned. The chapter talks about the ideological system of Putin's Russia known as “paradigmatic pluralism,” which assumes the existence and dialogue between varying paradigms of socio-political thinking. It details how the relations between Russia and the West had significantly worsened, noting the expansion of NATO eastward that sent Russian forces to invade Ukraine in February 2022.
Introduction
Authors: Freedman Paul
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter provides a background of Jaume Caresmar and his fellow canons at Santa Maria de Bellpuig de les Avellanes. These historians reclaimed Catalonia’s past and attempted to ensure its progress in the Age of Enlightenment. Indeed, the story of the Bellpuig antiquarians has implications for the historical and cultural situation of Catalonia, a territory that enjoyed immense power and prestige in the Middle Ages, but whose autonomy in the modern era has often been repressed and its cultural identity ignored by the Spanish state. Members of the Bellpuig circle were interested in the Middle Ages in part because of their concern for the history of the church, but also because the centuries between Charlemagne and the Spanish arrival in the New World formed a period of efflorescence and power for the territory whose major city, Barcelona, was among the great actors in Mediterranean trade, war, and political influence. In addition to Caresmar and his associates and the evolution of Catalonia’s national identity, the book also considers the loss and survival of medieval records.
Textual Cacophony
Authors: Johnson Daniel
Published: May 2024

This book explores the behaviors and routines of communication within anonymous internet culture in Japan. Focusing on the video-sharing website Niconico, social media aggregation sites, and the notorious 2channel message board, the book uncovers these sites' complex cultures of writing that obscure meaning through playful and opaque forms of deviant script and overwhelming waves of text. Those practices conflate language with images, meaning with play, and confound individual representation with aggregate forms of social identity. The book argues that online media cultures in and around Japan are entwined with a cultural logic and visual syntax of cacophony that expresses ambivalence toward representation, media form, and distinct experiences of time. This aesthetic of cacophony provides an alternative way of expressing social identity and belonging, with an unmarked sense of anonymity providing a counter-form to the dissolving institutions and relationships of neoliberal Japan. The book investigates what it means and feels like to participate in this influential online culture.
Methodology Matters
Authors: Watson Vajra M.
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the use of portraiture to merge the systematic and careful description of good ethnography with the evocative resonance of fine literature when humanizing the data collection process. Portraiture is rooted in a style of vivid storytelling that allows the reader into the moment and permits a multifaceted reality to unfold that feels, and is, alive and authentic. The chapter explains that portraiture seeks to unveil the universal truths and resonant stories that lie in the specifics and complexity of everyday life. The chapter considers The Art and Science of Portraiture by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot as a roadmap for ideas and insights about how to develop the arc of an investigation. It details how the portraits of the people within the Black Child Legacy Campaign (BCLC) were carefully crafted to humanize them.
Epilogue
Authors: Slobodkin Yan
Published: May 2024

This chapter considers the notion of imperialism without sovereignty. The history of French colonial famine draws attention to the importance of norms of responsibility and techniques of management. Instead of deflecting responsibility for famine, the French Empire accepted subsistence as an obligation, and successor states of the French Empire found themselves poorly equipped for effective famine management. The chapter cites that modern humanitarianism is the residue that was left over when the formal political ties binding the empire fell away, a form of imperialism without sovereignty. It also explains how non-governmental organizations, like the Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere (CARE), undertook to govern functions usually assumed by states during the Sahelian famine of the early 1970s.
​The Politics of Identity and Religion
Authors: Frangakis-Syrett Elena
Published: May 2024

This chapter looks into the relations between Muslims and Christians in Izmir in the late eighteenth century. Izmir became the premier port of the empire's export and import trade, landed and maritime. The chapter examines how social cohesion was achieved through secular entertainment, while also taking into account the acute economic crisis and political turmoil. Public open-air entertainment shows could bring to the surface simmering tensions about social and economic status, gender relations, and public comportment. The chapter then details the urban riot unprecedented in scale, intensity, and loss of life, referencing how it became a trigger for Izmir's widespread economic distress.
Visual Depictions of Muslim Heroines
Authors: Rustomji Nerina
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the visual depictions of Muslim heroines in nineteenth-century English literature. It primarily focuses on the poems of Lord Byron which question the idea of a Muslim society. Byron played an important role in popularizing Muslim heroines by invoking houris, or the pure, female companions of Islam. Additionally, the conceptual exploration is valuable since English writers in the nineteenth century often made assertions about religious and civilizational differences between Islam and Christianity in essays, poems, and Oriental tales. The chapter also discusses the notion of houri providing a possible model for how females may represent a sublime sensuality.
Introduction
Authors: Seng Guo-Quan
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter provides a background of interethnic relations in the Dutch East Indies. Between the 1750s and the 1830s, new waves of male Chinese traders, artisans, and laborers landed on the shores of northern coastal Java and elsewhere across Southeast Asia. Dutch colonial restriction of immigration and its system of religious plurality created the conditions for the growth of Southeast Asia's largest creolized Chinese communities. The chapter explains that the book historicizes the making of a Chinese settler patrilineal society on the northern coast of Dutch-colonized Java between the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Male Chinese migrants did not have sovereign control over colonial society, but they did order their families and communities under the colonial rubric of private or family law. Uncovering the intimate dynamics of race-making, the book shows how a creolized Chinese identity was born and reinvented in Java under more than a century of Dutch colonial rule (1816–1942).
Active Matter, Vital Force
Authors: Brown Laura
Published: May 2024

This chapter lays out the discursive underpinnings of other-than-human force for the modern imagination through a comparison of Isaac Newton's “Queries” to the Optics (1704, 1717–18, 1730) and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). In the language of the Optics, the focus on “experienced bodies” asserts the capacity of matter to attract or pull or “act,” an agency that is itself enacted in Newton's gravitational theory. In Defoe's narrative, also, things act by populating the “desert” island through the ongoing activity of irresistible succession: the autonomous generation of things from things. The chapter argues that these corollary discourses of autonomy and of irresistible succession create a form of counterhuman motion, in which matter moves beyond or without or separately from the human. Both Newton's and Defoe's texts show matter moving and demonstrate a counterhuman imaginative impact irrelevant to the conventional critical focus on the agency of the novelistic human protagonist.
Presidents, Coalitions, and Indonesia
Authors: Mietzner Marcus
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how Indonesia emerged as the opposite of a weak, unstable presidential democracy with high incumbency turnover. With two presidents in two decades, Indonesia has presented itself as an anchor of stability in a Southeast Asian region prone to frequent changes in government. The chapter begins by looking at the discussion of presidentialism since the Juan Linz controversy in the early 1990s. It then proceeds by introducing in some detail the concept of coalitional presidentialism, and the way it has been applied thus far. The chapter also presents the case study of Indonesia, followed by a comparative contextualization of the country within a broader coalitional presidentialism and democratic decline context. Finally, the chapter offers a revised definition of coalitional presidentialism that includes a larger range of actors and takes its applicability beyond the limitations of the executive-legislative arena.
The Bureaucracy
Authors: Mietzner Marcus
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on the bureaucracy's role in presidential coalitions. It begins by describing the powers the bureaucracy can use when negotiating with the president. These powers center around the threat of omission and the promise of passionate deliverance. In addition to policy implementation, this can also imply assistance in elections, which is technically banned but practically widespread. Presidents possess equally strong powers vis-à-vis the bureaucracy; they hold the supreme appointment authority for upper echelon administrators and can direct funds or withhold them. The display of their respective powers usually results in a settlement between presidents and the bureaucracy. The chapter then offers a case study that focuses on the revision of the civil service law in 2013. The first draft of the law threatened key interests of the bureaucracy, leading it to mobilize against the bill. Fearful of the bureaucracy's insubordination, President Yudhoyono agreed to address its concerns. Consequently, the coalitional relationship between the president and the bureaucracy was restored.
Local Governments
Authors: Mietzner Marcus
Published: May 2024

This chapter assesses local administrations' powers over the presidency. Increased post-2001, fiscal rights are a major component of these powers, but political grassroots mobilization capacity is equally important. The chapter describes the authority presidents can bear to coerce or incentivize local government cooperation and support. Budget allocations, especially for local infrastructure, are key to presidential leverage, as are administrative oversight functions and formal appointment rights. The chapter also looks at how the two sides balance their powers in coalitional presidentialism negotiations. Finally, it traces the rise of Tri Rismaharini from a low-level local bureaucrat in Surabaya to the city's wildly popular mayor and, in 2020, to a position in Widodo's cabinet. Her career illustrates how identities of members of presidential coalitions often overlap and hence tie their various actors even closer together.
The Oligarchs
Authors: Mietzner Marcus
Published: May 2024

This chapter highlights the powers of oligarchs vis-à-vis the presidency. It focuses on the wealth of oligarchs and presidents' dependence on it but also examines how oligarchs—through their role in the economy—are key to macroeconomic stability. The chapter looks at the authority of presidents that oligarchs fear and would like to draw from. This includes the president's control of state contracts and regulatory frameworks that are crucial for the existence of oligarchs and their enterprises. The chapter also explores the mechanisms of cooperation between the two sides, with coalitional presidentialism offering an effective framework for their interdependence. Finally, it presents a case study of Aburizal Bakrie, the former Golkar chair and minister, which offers valuable insights into the extent and limitations of oligarchic power when dealing with presidents.
Letter Eleven
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This chapter tackles Plato's letter to Laodamas. It mentions how Loadamas asked for Plato and Socrates, but he is sick with strangury and Plato himself felt like he should not do any of what Laodamas asked him, due to his age and bodily condition. However, Plato offers counseling for Laodamas and to the colonists by giving a law for a city established without the existence of sovereign authority caring for daily regimens. The chapter also cites that Plato urged Laodamas to pray to the gods with regard to men worthy of the ruling office and their subsequent education. Plato wishes Laodamas good luck in his endeavors.
Radical Theater
Authors: Zeitlin Froma I.
Published: May 2024

This chapter looks at Richard Schechner's production of Dionysus in 69, which is a reworking of Euripides' Bacchae. Dionysus in 69 remains a landmark in the history of the reception of Greek theater in the twentieth century. It demonstrates not only the degree to which each era chooses the interpretations that correspond to its own preoccupations, but the degree to which those preoccupations regulate even the choice of a particular drama itself. The themes of the Bacchae—violence, madness, ecstasy, release of libidinal energy, relations between extremes of group and individual, challenges to authority, transgressions of taboos, and freedom of moral choice—are precisely those which found quite uncanny analogues in the cultural conflicts of the day. At the same time, experiments with different lifestyles and attitudes went hand in hand with artistic experimentation in theater, which challenged both actors and audience in new and unsettling ways. Ultimately, Dionysus in 69 proved to be the perfect vehicle for testing the principles of Schechner's theatrical vision as a communal experience.
The Educated Muslim Woman and Algeria’s Path to Progress
Authors: Rahnama Sara
Published: May 2024

This chapter considers the importance of the education of Muslim women in Algeria’s path to progress. The Muslim press devoted enormous intellectual energy to discussions about women’s education across the interwar years. The chapter mentions that the calls for women’s education spoke directly to French colonial stereotypes about Muslim misogyny. It then highlights how reformist discussions similarly presented women’s education as a path to future renaissance. By the late 1930s, the Muslim reform movement had established more of its own schools, which offered Muslim children a multidisciplinary education. The chapter considers the associations affiliated with the reformists alongside women’s active participation in reformist education.
A Crisis of Confidence
Authors: Griffith Luke
Published: May 2024

This chapter details how President Jimmy Carter handled the Enhanced Radiation Weapon (ERW), also known as the neutron bomb. The neutron bomb fiasco was a precursor and the political impetus for the dual-track decision, which was largely an effort to restore West German confidence in US extended deterrence and repair Carter's relationship with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. The chapter looks into how the Carter administration mishandled the gray area problem involving a source of tension with NATO allies and Congress. Moreover, the Carter administration committed mistakes that inflamed West German anxiety about the SS-20s. The chapter also considers how unclear could the Carter administration implement the Los Alamos consensus.
Engaging the “Defective Vending Machine”
Authors: Griffith Luke
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides an overview of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) negotiations of the Reagan administration. It explains how the zero option was President Reagan's way of getting the Soviet intermediate-range missiles out of Europe. To enhance US bargaining leverage, American policymakers planned to implement the basing program. The chapter cites how the Reagan administration remained mindful of European politics amidst the negotiation process. However, President Reagan typically stuck to his principles of distrusting the Soviet leadership and demanded a global INF agreement with stringent verification provisions. The chapter then highlights how the INF Treaty with Moscow remained in a deadlock.
Law without Justice
Authors: Drexler Elizabeth F.
Published: May 2024

This chapter analyzes a campaign that Indonesian ​non-governmental organizations (NGOs) launched in 2015 to name the use of criminal law against activists kriminalisasi, usually translated as “criminalization.” Since 2015, kriminalisasi focuses on visible but unseen and ordinary forms of human rights violations enabled by subtle everyday laws, institutional cultures, and practices that dehumanize and stigmatize individuals or groups of citizens. The chapter shows that law and politics are core elements of the infrastructure of impunity. The chapter discusses how activists approach criminalization as a problem that can be resolved legally and retain the belief that law is the only avenue for justice for those with less money and power in a corrupt and oligarchical political system with legacies of authoritarianism. It explores the infrastructure of impunity that leads to and is itself a structural injustice.
Imperial Enterprise
Authors: Pitock Toni
Published: May 2024

This chapter talks about the Franks family, who were Ashkenazim that aided the expansion of Britain into the North American interior in the wake of the Seven Years' War. It highlights how the various members of the Franks family demonstrated their allegiance and commitment to the expanding empire through backcountry trade, army contracting, and land speculation. In contrast to their dedication to the British Empire, the Franks' Jewishness is marginal and inconsequential. The chapter describes how the mercantile and class aspirations of the Franks family did not differ from those of the Christians with whom they traded. Their proximity to gentile colonists was underlined by the marriages that siblings David and Phila Franks entered into with Christians.
Jewish Involvement in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions
Authors: Klooster Wim
Published: May 2024

This chapter discuses the quest for equality, which makes a tour around the Atlantic world in order to retrieve Jewish thoughts and actions during the era of revolutions. It reveals that, despite the age-old discriminatory laws against Jews everywhere, there was no generalized Jewish push for equality. Full individual equality meant the loss of Jewish self-rule, which many Jews felt would jeopardize the traditional Jewish way of life, centered around adherence to rabbinical culture. The chapter emphasizes how others may have cherished autonomy because it was organized around the dispensation of charity to the numerous Jewish poor. There was no lack of Jews who fully submerged themselves in the ideas and politics of revolutionary regimes.
Before
Authors: Fichter James R.
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides an overview of tea consumption and tea politics before 1773. Tea was both legally imported and widely smuggled in the colonies, and this smuggling was part of a larger British phenomenon. However, both the Parliament's Townshend acts (1767) and the North ministry's Tea Act (1773) commercially and politically failed in curbing the smuggling and securing the colonial tea trade. Between 1772 and 1782, three-quarters of the tea brought to Europe by all the European East India Companies was smuggled into Britain. The chapter elaborates on colonial tea smuggling networks, citing how geography made smuggling hard to stop in North America.