This chapter outlines the geography and taxonomy of language use in the Caucasus region, highlighting notions such as the incompatibility of linguistic and genetic data. It discusses the regional specificity of Caucasus languages and the concept of Sprachbund, and the possibility of a source for Caucasian languages outside the region. It further examines putative connections between Kartvelian and Anatolia and Armenian with the steppe, and reviews the impact on Turkic- and Indo-European-speakers on populations of the Caucasus.

The 2024 presidential election in the USA demonstrates, with unmistakable clarity, that disinformation (intentionally false information) and misinformation (unintentionally false information disseminated in good faith) pose a real and growing existential threat to democratic self-government in the United States – and elsewhere too. Powered by social media outlets like Facebook (Meta) and Twitter (X), it is now possible to propagate empirically false information to a vast potential audience at virtually no cost. Coupled with the use of highly sophisticated algorithms that carefully target the recipients of disinformation and misinformation, voter manipulation is easier to accomplish than ever before – and frighteningly effective to boot.

The expansion of cities in the Global South has given shape to a social and material dynamics of “habitation” whose relationship to the emancipatory promise of citizenship is neither uniform nor stable (Holston 2009). Although cities are known for their capacity to generate the kinds of mass action that can lead to the “enlargement” of citizenship rights (Holston and Appadurai 1996), the material exigencies of urbanization, such as housing, infrastructure, and services, pose certain explanatory limits to this characterization. Henry Lefevbre defined this as a shift in urban political consciousness and representation from “production to reproduction,” specifically, toward neighborhood-level questions of occupation, settlement, and habitation (Lefevbre, quoted in Holston 2009; S. Benjamin 2008). Such transformations in urban political participation and activism highlight the growing role of land in producing the “congregations of interests that underpin disjunctures in the way cities get built” (S. Benjamin 2008: 245). This is especially the case in post-Partition Karachi, where the “control of land ownership comes hand in hand with a degree of power and control over the city, its population and its investors” (Hasan et al. 2015: 20).

I argue that in the case of Pakistan, the narrative of the urbanization of the political has been profoundly shaped by the onset, retreat, and return of competing orders of military and civilian “rule.” As a postcolonial political concept, “rule” implies both neocolonial and self-determining modalities of sovereignty in motion, especially in the context of Pakistan, where, as the previous chapter made clear, the institutional and cultural locus of sovereignty remains undecided. One site where the tussle between martial and civilian forms of “rule” has been especially pronounced is at the level of neighborhood urban life. More specifically, repeated and abrupt shifts in the structure of state sovereignty have been accompanied by the attendant waxing and waning of the apparatus of elected local government. One of the most vivid yet underexamined effects of this process on Pakistan's democratic landscape has been the inflation of the powers of such elected “local bodies” during martial rule combined with the sheer absence of any form of elected local government during periods of civilian democracy (until 2015).

This chapter draws together the whole argument of the book to face the defining question that it must answer, and through that answer to unfurl the full significance of incarnational theology. The question is, what happens when God’s purpose to be with us now and forever meets with a refusal? Addressing the question of humankind’s alienation from God, itself and the wider creation is not, from the point of view of incarnational theology, the central dynamic of Christianity, as it is in conventional accounts. But the utter with-ness of Jesus inevitably encounters the profound, widespread and powerful resistance to God’s embrace: and the truth of God is thereby revealed like never before. Jesus does not ‘come to die’: yet in his death and resurrection he exposes the forces that oppose him and displays the dynamic that sent him and settles the only questions about existence and essence that ultimately matter.

Here I begin my constructive account of a Christocentric incarnational theology. The Trinity has a chapter on its own: only thus may I express my insistence that this is fundamentally a story about God, and that creation, human beings and their divine destiny must stand in the light of that priority. My concern is to withstand the anthropocentrism of so much theology, which centres human existence and need, rather than God’s character and purpose, as the story’s focal point. The eight dimensions of being with provide a helpful structure through which to articulate the claims made about the Trinity.

This chapter critically examines the long-debated issue of Turkey’s state security and survival discourse through the lens of the securitisation logic of protection in order to unpack how the AKP government has used an expansive definition of security threat to allow for the suppression of the basic rights of dissenters by invoking the need to protect the state. The first section presents an historical account of the discourse on Turkey’s primary referent object of security – state survival (beka sorunu). The second section describes the Turkish state’s current security flagging of refugees as ‘risky outsiders’ and of those purged as ‘dangerous insiders’. The last section examines state authorisation of various auxiliary armed security agents and forces. I argue that in lieu of protecting its citizens, the AKP’s authoritarian securitisation state protects the state, the discursive ‘nation,’ and the security apparatus, a practice it legitimizes via a discourse of terrorism insecurity.

The introduction offers an analysis of Edward Penny’s painting A City Shower (1764) and Jonathan Swift’s “A Description of a City Shower” (1710), from which it takes its inspiration, in order to establish the key concerns of the chapters that follow. These include the ways in which an ideal of urban life is so often represented as being embattled or under pressure in representations of walking; the anxieties and concerns about social intermixing in London’s public places; the physical and imaginative ordering and structuring of London’s streets; and the circulation, reworking, and persistence of particular tropes and images that is a hallmark of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century accounts of the city. It also situates the book’s focus within other accounts of the city in this period.

This chapter uses book history and digital humanities approaches to situate e-books’ liminal ‘book but not real book’ status in historic and contemporary contexts. The question of whether digital books deserve full status as ‘books’ – and equality with print – has dogged e-books since their inception. Readers are now negotiating e-book realness on their own terms. Addressing definitions of bookness and long-standing debates on digital materiality, the chapter progresses through aspects of legitimacy to analysis of qualitative data on whether, and why, readers consider e-books real. The complexity of readers’ conceptions of the realness of e-books demonstrates how strands of the metaphor of the book, the bookness of physical books, the realness of electronic texts, and the particularities of paratext and literary status for digital works interweave, setting the stage for subsequent chapters following the reader through stages of discovering, obtaining, reading, retaining, displaying, and (sometimes) loving a digital book.

Introduction

The fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) was discovered by Tsui, Stormer and Gossard in 1982 at Bell Labs. They observed that at very high magnetic fields, a 2DEG shows fractional quantization of the Hall conductance. In particular, they got a quantized Hall plateau of magnitude ρxy = 3h/e2, which is accompanied by the vanishing of the longitudinal conductivity, ρxx, at low temperature (T < 5 K) in GaAs and AlGaAs samples. As opposed to the integer quantum Hall effect (IQHE), where an integer number of Landau levels (LLs) are occupied, here in FQHE the LLs are partially occupied. If onemakes themagnetic field large enough, the lowest Landau level (LLL) will be partially filled. Whatwe can expect is that the system will form some kind of a lattice, for example, a Wigner crystal or a charge density wave. Thus, it naively seems to be reasonable that the system would like to minimize its potential energy, since there is no kinetic energy left in the system corresponding to the LLL, and only a trivial zero point energy is present in the system. Thus, the ions tend to stay away from each other and form something similar to a crystal lattice. However, surprisingly that does not happen, and instead the system becomes an incompressible quantum liquid, which has gaps in the energy spectrum at filling 1/m (m: odd, or a rational fraction of the form n/m). So it is inevitable that the systemminimizes its energy by having gaps at fractional values of filling. The reason is that, owing to the presence of a large number of electrons (macroscopically degenerate in any of the LLs), a many-body interaction is induced, which in fact makes the excitations above this incompressible ground state to be fractional. So in essence, the Hall current carries a fractional charge.

This essay draws upon recent developments in histories of finance and Black studies to argue for an expanded consideration of late nineteenth-century speculative fiction. In recent decades, speculation has emerged as a foundational methodology, critical framework, and literary genre in African American literary studies and Black studies. Yet, within this body of scholarship, speculative fiction is most often associated with anti-realist modes that imagine alternate futures while speculative reading and research methods double as a critique of our political and disciplinary limits. Through a close reading of Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition, this essay considers how speculation’s late nineteenth-century instruments and logics determine the novel’s political horizons and narrative structure. By attending to the financial workings of late nineteenth-century novels that might seem to strain against the bounds of either genre fiction or speculative research methods, this essay argues that we can begin to see how a work like Chesnutt’s interrogates a particularly postbellum outlook on the future, one in which the terms of financial speculation can only imagine a future that is an intensification of the past.

Horrors of Slavery announced an abolitionist politics unacknowledged by Romantic-era antislavery activists: place-based, self-liberation initiated and led by Black women. Reworking the abolitionist figure of the sorrowful, enslaved Black mother, Wedderburn celebrated his mother, Rosanna, who demanded that his enslaver father manumit him, and championed his grandmother, Talkee Amy, as a higgler and obeah woman who “trafficked on her own account.” Similar freedom practices are then traced throughout The History of Mary Prince. Prince’s repeated petit marronage demanded enslavers’ acknowledgment of her kinship with her parents and husband. As a higgler, like Talkee Amy, Prince used the produce from the provision grounds to assert freedom in fugitive markets. Wedderburn and Prince’s life narratives brought stories of Black women’s place-based freedom practices to a white audience.