Chapter 6 focuses on the careers of four artists of African descent in the Rio de la Plata: Fermín Gayoso, Rosendo Mendizábal, Juan Blanco de Aguirre, and Bernardino Posadas. They work in different historical contexts, from the colonial era to the end of the nineteenth century. The first was enslaved and was active in the early nineteenth century. Therefore, his trajectory differs from the rest. Mendizábal, on the other hand, was not only a painter but also a politician, maintaining ties to the Buenos Aires elite of the 1850s and 1860s. The historical and social context was quite different for Juan Blanco de Aguirre and Bernardino Posadas. These artists were active in the last quarter of the century, when the project of a racially and culturally homogeneous nation implemented by the dominant groups was in full swing. The analysis undertaken in this chapter provides a glimpse of the situation of Afro-Porteño intellectuals and especially of the few artists of whom we have information, as well as the tensions generated by the educational and promotion projects in which they were involved.

This chapter discusses the means by which poetry reached its audiences in the period 1450-1600, covering verse produced in classical languages and in different forms of Italian vernacular. The advent of print in the mid-1400s provided authors and readers with a new medium for accessing and sharing poetry, without diminishing the importance of manuscript diffusion, or of oral recitation in live performance, whether in elite, domestic or popular settings. As the chapter shows, the three media were exploited simultaneously by contemporary writers, with thoughtful attention to the appeal, benefits and limitations of the different possibilities for engaging with patrons and public afforded by each means. It discusses the advantages of oral, manuscript or print transmission in relation to questions of prestige, reputation and financial gain or loss, with reflection on the multiple agents involved in putting poetry into circulation, from writers and performers to editors, printers and vendors.

This essay explores the deep and longstanding relationship between African Americans and the Declaration of Independence. From the 1770s to the present, black activists and thinkers have consistently excoriated the paradox of an American democracy that proclaims inalienable rights while systematically denying black citizens’ rights. Drawing on figures such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Frances E. W. Harper, Anna Julia Haywood Cooper, and Shirley Chisholm, the text illustrates how African Americans have employed the Declaration as a foundation for their demands for the abolition of slavery, civil rights, and equality. It examines black protest rhetoric’s critique of white supremacy, hypocrisy, and the failure of the United States to live up to its foundational principles. And it emphasizes the crucial role black women have played in advancing black liberation and expanding the scope of equality to include gender and race. Through the centuries, African Americans have called for the United States of America to reconcile its practices with its founding document’s principles of equality and justice for all.

The pre-1949 era witnessed the rise of wage labour and early efforts by workers and governments to counter labour precarity in China. This chapter gives a brief overview of how the three mechanisms that generate labour precarity played out for wage labourers before 1949, particularly during the Republican era (1912–1949), what labour institutions underpinned their functioning, and how they were countered. As some of these institutions and their variations have remained robust in post-1949 China, this chapter provides a starting point for explaining the emergence and evolution of labour tenure regimes after 1949. By outlining working conditions before 1949, it also serves as a baseline for comparing working conditions between the pre-1949 era and periods thereafter, thus allowing a better understanding of what CCP rule has meant for Chinese workers.

Matteo Ricci’s entry into China at the end of the sixteenth century coincided with broader changes in the regional power dynamics of East Asia. Ming China was entering a period of dynastic decay. It was plagued by economic problems and pressed by the Manchus, a peoples from beyond the Great Wall. Chapter 4, covering the turbulent Ming-Qing inter-dynastic transition period between 1610 and 1644, tells the story of a version of Matteo Ricci’s world map, which was appropriated by the Manchus as they were forming their own identity and were planning to invade China. The chapter shows that the Manchus, coming in contact with Ricci’s world map created a practice of translation which they then applied to Chinese maps.

This chapter first sets the scene by depicting the persistence of labour precarity in China in the past century. Second, it juxtaposes such persistence with Marxism and the modernization theory to raise the research question and introduce the two debates with which this book engages. Third, this chapter reviews the previous scholarship, based on which it defines key concepts and proposes an analytical framework. Fourth, it explains the research strategy of this book and the periodization method. It concludes by outlining this book.

This introduction presents the historical and social context of Argentina in the nineteenth century, as it relates to the local Afro-descendant population. It explains the building-nation conceived by the dominant groups toward the end of the century. The project sought to create a national imaginary founded on the notion of a culturally and racially homogeneous country of white European descent. This project necessarily entailed the disappearance of the population of African (and Indigenous) descent as part of the nation. The strategies used to achieve this project (census, cultural appropriation, official history) are mentioned. In this sense, it is proposed that the construction and recurrent use of visual stereotypes throughout the nineteenth century (concentrated in specific iconographic nuclei) was one of the strategies used in the process of invisibilization of the descendants of enslaved Africans in Argentina. It also explains the state of the art on the subject, the theoretical framework, and the methodology used in the research.

The key question posed by this volume’s Introduction is: What happens when Western law is no longer the default referent for legal modernity? This question has implications for such fields as comparative law, international law, and law and technology. “Inter-Asian Law” points to an emerging field of comparative and international law that explores the legal interactions – historical and contemporary – between and among Asian jurisdictions. These interactions – through diverse actors, intermediaries, processes, and methods – may lead to several important formations including legal transplantation, law and development, multilateralism and trade blocks, global value chains, transnational orders, judicial networks, legal educational exchange, and digital integration, to name a few. After providing definitions for core terms, the Introduction provides an analytical framework that guides the subsequent chapters including types and methods of interactions, actors and intermediaries, and effects, consequences, and conflicts. A description of the organization of the book follows.

On an upper floor of the Tridentine Diocesan Museum in a series of darkened rooms the walls are lined with glass cases. Inside them are vestments. It is yet one more measure of our great distance from William Durand. Chasubles, copes, surplices, and dalmatics are displayed as fragile matter: behind glass in cases controlled for temperature, moisture, and light. Chasubles are arranged in chronological order along one wall; copes, surplices, and dalmatics, fewer in number, are in other cases. It is not merely that all are separated from the persons who, Durand’s word, used them – as they would have been when those persons were not celebrating a Mass. Nor is it that they are fixed in place and separated from one another. We come closer when we recognize that all have been removed from their place, the place of worship, but that, too, still is only part of their transformation. All are kept permanently physically and spatially isolated both from those persons and also from the place with which they had so complexly participated in the meaning of the Mass. They have become objects, their intricate embroidery now the focus of our gaze.

Why were Chinese world maps translated in early modern Europe? This chapter answers this question by focusing on the story of the 1584 map of China, Chinae, olim Sinarum Regio nova descriptio by Abraham Ortelius. This was the first popular and widely disseminated map of China and it was based on a translation from Chinese sources. In discussing this map, the chapter will cover the period between 1550 and 1584. It will argue that the European cartographic interest in China was motivated by the rivalry between Spain and Portugal around the controversy about a line stretching from pole to pole demarcating their territories in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

“The Poet” is what Adorno calls a “carpet essay,” which weaves its announced topics of the poet and poetry into a host of other subjects: character and expression; reception and abandonment; beauty and love; the present, new, and near; the Neoplatonic One or “whole”; and a fundamental “flowing” or “metamorphosis.” Chapter 8 focuses on Emerson’s romantic and proto-existentialist pronouncement that “the man is only half himself, the other half is his expression”; his theory that language “is fossil poetry”; and the proto-pragmatic picture of language in his statement that “all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.” Other topics treated are the place of what Kant calls “unbounded” ideas in Emerson’s account of poetry, thinking as a mixture of reception and activity, and the connections and differences of “Experience” and “The Poet.”

The 1958–1965 period witnessed the rise and fall of the Great Leap Forward. During this period, China saw the second and most radical switch between decentralized and recentralized industrialization in the Mao era, and a further swing in labour policy towards promoting temporary employment. This chapter begins by presenting an overview of the economic and political circumstances of this period. It then examines how the rise and fall of the Great Leap Forward, combined with the shift in labour policy, dramatically redrew the exclusion system, thus affecting the scale and conditions of those in precarious urban employment.

The essays in this volume resemble the dialogue with the four children that takes place at the Passover Seder. The wise child is prepared to honor the commitments and aspirations made in 1776 but needs instruction on how to do so. The wicked child refuses to identify with the commitments made in 1776, either because the child identifies with some status hierarchy or, more likely, the child refuses to take seriously the pleas of faux revolutionaries who were committed to illegitimate status hierarchies during the late eighteenth century. The simple child does not understand the significance of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 or in 2026. The fourth child cannot figure out how to frame a question in the twenty-first century about a document written in the eighteenth century. The wise child assumes without adequate reflection a commitment to the Passover story and the Declaration of Independence. American independence was forged on a foundation of soldiers who died for lower taxes and, arguably, more secure rights to hold others in bondage. These problems require retelling both the Passover and the Declaration stories, so that the simple child can determine intelligently whether commitment to either (the same?) tradition is warranted.