This chapter discusses the variegated dynamics of English-language rap in the complex, stratified, and multilingual sociolinguistic environment of India. The first section provides a brief overview of the historical and sociocultural positioning of English in India. The following section lays out a genealogy of English rap in India, discussing its evolution over the past three decades. The third and final section, which forms the analytical crux of the chapter, uses examples from lyrics and an interview to contextually analyze how the choice to rap in English reproduces as well as contests the intersections between sociolinguistic dynamics, politics of regionalism and marketability, caste identities, and racialization. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how English rap in India is simultaneously rife with possibilities for artists while also transcending the oversimplifications associated with English usage in India.

The years of the French Revolution and First Empire are remembered as much for war and imperial expansion as for the great political and social reforms they introduced. The Revolutionaries saw themselves as sons of the Enlightenment, devoted to ideals of freedom and the betterment of humanity. Yet they unleashed a long period of almost continuous warfare, fought across the European continent and beyond, in North Africa and the Near East, in North America, Asia, and the Caribbean. In Europe, France faced a succession of coalitions of other European powers, from the First Coalition of 1792–7 – an international alliance that included Austria, Prussia, Britain, Spain, Piedmont, Naples, and Sardinia – through to the final coalition, the Seventh, which wearily regrouped to defeat Napoleon after his ill-judged return to France in 1815. The other governments of Europe feared France’s political ambitions as much as its military might, and they invariably saw themselves as the victims of French aggression, forced to make war to protect their territory from attack. Britain also feared the challenge to its naval and colonial supremacy which a revitalised France would pose; for London the war was as much about Jamaica and India as the balance of power in Continental Europe, about global competition for resources as much as the ideas of the Revolution in France.

Chapter 2, Stereotyped Knowledge, examines irregular practitioners’ global trade in cheap manuals on venereal disease, sexual debility, and fertility problems. While previous scholarship has largely focused on these manuals’ lurid depictions of weakened male bodies, this chapter emphasizes their origins in respected publications: often calling themselves “consulting surgeons,” a term from hospital practice, irregular practitioners combined verbatim sections from textbooks and treatises aimed at medics with snippets from works in other genres to construct their own “popular treatises.” Some of these productions were issued in several different languages and circulated around the globe. At home and abroad, they offered readers an affordable means of acquiring modern information about sex reproduction, derived from the science of anatomy, and their authors a means of cultivating trust in their expertise and advertising more expensive products and services. Examining other medical practitioners’ responses, this chapter argues that these manuals and their makers were seen as both an economic and existential threat to regular medicine.

This chapter examines the lengthy history and usage of the terms "translocal," "translocality," and "translocalism," which have been crucial to humanistic and social scientific inquiry about issues of literature, culture, globalization, and territorialization since the 1990s. It recounts the evolution of these terms from seventeenth-century debates about religion through early twentieth-century ideas about politics, psychology, and artistic analysis. It then turns to the present, concentrating on the reemergence of these concepts during the 1990s among social scientists seeking to describe geography and space, human movement, migration, and boundary crossing (in the work of Massey, Appadurai, Clifford, Hannerz, Smith, and others). It describes how these concepts change scholarly studies of mobility, networks, and national and transnational identity (in the work of Kraidy and Murphy, Freitag and Oppen, Brickell and Datta, and Greiner and Sakdapolark), and then it recounts their impacts on literary, historical, and cultural methodologies, especially those involving European empires, poetry and poetics, and colonial and postcolonial literature (including Ramazani, Ballantyne, and Burton). Ultimately, this chapter suggests how literary and historical scholars might connect humanistic accounts of translocalism with social scientific notions of translocality to refocus scholarship on how migration and spatial scale have affected literature and culture.

For all uses of biomass, it is of paramount importance that we not only have information about biomass availability and its usefulness for bioprocessing for making any kind of commodity or chemicals, but that we are also aware that the use of biomass for bioprocessing often competes with a growing need for food. This chapter gives an overview of the global need for food, the potential of biomass production, and an introduction to the carbon cycle. The reader is introduced to production and collection of biomasses from land use, biomass of the future from the ocean, and biomass by separation of organic waste. Usefulness and ease of using biomass are related to composition; therefore, methods to analyze biomass composition and quality are presented.

Global platforms present novel challenges. They serve as powerful conduits of commerce and global community. Yet their power to influence political and consumer behavior is enormous. Their responsibility for the use of this power – for their content – is statutorily limited by national laws such as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the US. National efforts to demand and guide appropriate content moderation, and to avoid private abuse of this power, is in tension with concern in liberal states to avoid excessive government regulation, especially of speech. Diverse and sometimes contradictory national rules responding to these tensions on a national basis threaten to splinter platforms, and reduce their utility to both wealthy and poor countries. This edited volume sets out to respond to the question whether a global approach can be developed to address these tensions while maintaining or even enhancing the social contribution of platforms.

The ecological thinking of the Georgics leads to intricate problems of scale, which Chapter 4 traces. The poem seeks to conceptualize humans’ place in their local environments – epitomized by the bounded space of the farm – while also imagining life at larger scales and attempting to think the world as a coherent whole. The chapter connects these issues to political, geographical, agricultural, philosophical, and poetical questions. This chapter finds in the Georgics a searching exploration of what it means to be local, and whether such a thing is even possible in the age of Jupiter and the time of Caesar. Ultimately, the poem rethinks a more nuanced concept of locality that is intertwined with the global, and is of shifting, unpredictable scale: a concept of fractal locality. At the center of the poem, Vergil places a fitting emblem for a fractally local poetry, the temple he vows in his native Mantua. This temple models Vergil’s achievement as anchored in particular place, and yet in a place that has become local, Roman, Italian, and global all at once.

This chapter explores the relationship between John Clare’s writing and the evolving discipline of ecocriticism which, in its broadest terms, treats literature as a representation of the physical world and the reader as a mediator between these complex environments. Clare’s work was central to the early ecocritical canon of the 1990s and continues, in more recent years, to shape our understanding of how and why environmental writing matters, particularly in a context of ecological despoliation, species extinction, and global warming. That Clare’s resolutely local voice and perspective should be at all relevant to an understanding of our broader world speaks to the challenge that he poses to modern readers by the example of his own relation to natural otherness. That relation, exemplified in poems such as ‘The Nightingales Nest’, is predicated on habits of attention and self-circumscription, a sequence by which the poet as ecological actor evokes the experience of coexistence.

This chapter explains how international society emerged and was globalised. Its main purpose is to explore how the European sovereign states-system expanded across the globe to become the truly international order of sovereign states that we see today. The first part of the chapter examines how the expansion of the states-system came about and how it has been analysed. The second part provides a critical discussion of how the spread of the states-system has been understood in IR. It aims provoke thinking about the enduring Eurocentrism that continues to bedevil our theorising of international politics.

This chapter considers the relevance of postcolonialism to the discipline of ‘international relations’ (IR). It argues that postcolonialism advances a powerful critique of traditional approaches to IR (see chapters on realism and liberalism) since it calls into question the discipline’s foundational ontological and epistemological assumptions. In particular, it challenges the dominant assumption that states are the basic units of IR and that we should examine the relations between these units in the context of an anarchical system. Postcolonialism refocuses our attention on the constitutive role played by colonialism in the creation of the modern world and sees international relations as hierarchical rather than anarchical. It sees academic disciplines such as IR – and Western rationalist, humanist and universalist modes of thinking in general – as complicit in reproducing colonial power relations and seeks normatively to resist practices of colonialism in its material and ideational forms, whether political, economic or cultural.