Weathering the Ill Wind: The Affective and Embodied Dimensions of Anti-Immigrant Political Discourses on Young African Men in Italy

Using the election of the far-right populist coalition government in Italy in 2018 and resultant legislative changes to immigration it brought about as an analytic lens, I examine the material and emotional impact of these changes on young African men, hosted as “unaccompanied minors” in a reception centre in a northern Italian town. I refer to these changes as an “ill wind” and in this paper examine its impacts using Christina Sharpe’s notion of “weathering” to refer to the totality of the ongoingness of the anti-Black climate and its effect on Black bodies. I contextualise the young men’s experiences within the Italian race landscape, thus drawing attention to the postcolonial legacies of race and racialisation still underpinning Italian society today. I present how historical structures of racial governmentality are integral to the geography of subordination and produce the racialised figure of the migrant, leaving some strangers to remain stranger than others.     

In Battle and in Bed: Wanton Women and Women Warriors in Muslim and Christian Crusade Narratives

This article analyses the parallel representations of enemy warrior women as sexually profligate and inappropriately martial in selected Latin and Arabic texts from the period of the first three crusades (late eleventh to late twelfth centuries). Cross-cultural comparison of depictions of fighting women demonstrates that both cultures portrayed the other side as dominated, and thus undermined, by women who were unnaturally assertive in both sexual and military affairs. Both Muslim and Christian authors sexualised and militarised the bodies of enemy women in order to define which men were the strongest, best and most deserving of battlefield victory in the holy wars of crusade and jihad.     

Imperial Liberalism and Institution Building at the End of Empire in Africa

ABSTRACT

This article discusses political liberalism at the end of empire in British Africa through analysis of British ideas about institution building below the level of parliamentary democracies. It suggests that while processes of institution-building have largely been discussed through the prism of development, they also constitute fruitful sites for the exploration of British ideas about the nature of politically-liberal systems. I argue that new articulations of an imperial liberalism during decolonisation had an energising effect on some Britons within domestic institutions whose expertise was called upon to assist with the development of successor institutions in emergent states. As they engaged in a process of institution-building, these individuals acted in ways that were not only determined by Western liberalism, but also by distinctive British ideas of the appropriate relationship of institutions to the state. I suggest, however, that while their approach to institution building in emergent states reflected deep rooted convictions about the kind of institutions that were essential to the operation of politically liberal systems, these ideals were in tension with more self-interested concerns which could in practice compromise efforts to replicate British institutions.     

From Little Gidding to Virginia: the seventeenth century Ferrar family in the Atlantic colonial context

This article explores the significance of the seventeenth-century Ferrar family’s involvement in Atlantic colonialism, and their interest in compiling natural histories of the various flora and fauna in the Virginia colony, particularly the silkworm. I argue that the Ferrars’ involvement in colonial enterprises, in particular the Virginia Company, was underpinned by a theology which centred upon the idea of recovering man’s original dominion over the earth, bestowed by God upon Adam in Eden, but lost in the Fall. The Ferrars’ commitment to this theology of repairing the post-lapsarian world enables us to integrate our understanding of the family’s colonial interests with their religiosity. There was no disjunction between the worldliness of the family’s commercial and colonial dealings with the Virginia Company, and the ascetic period of retreat at Little Gidding. This article contributes to a broader scholarly effort to understand the development of seventeenth-century Anglicanism in a colonial context.     

Dietary Stress and Animal Resource Use at the Postclassic Maya city,Mayapán (Mexico)

ABSTRACT

Environmental changes resulting in drought and reductions in the availability of animal resources during the Late Classic Maya have been linked with the Maya ‘collapse’. Decreases in availability of dietary staples such as artiodactyls, and particularly white-tailed deer, during the Late Classic period would have placed food stress on populations during later periods. To test this hypothesis, here bone breakage patterns are examined at the Postclassic Maya city, Mayapán, to assess whether artiodactyl bones were being intensively processed for bone fats (marrow and grease). Fragmentation morphology, size and surface markings, along with skeletal part representation and distribution of large mammal bones were recorded for bone assemblages from several houselots. Evidence suggests the Maya were likely utilising bone marrow from artiodactyls but not intensively and they were not extracting bone grease. These results indicate that decreased accessibility to artiodactyls during the Postclassic was not causing high levels of dietary stress for the Maya at Mayapán, which is consistent with recent evidence demonstrating dietary consistency during the Postclassic in northern Yucatan.     

The lit world: living with everyday urban automation

In this article, we develop and advance the concept of the lit world by bringing together literatures about everyday lighting, automation in everyday life and human perception, along with our ethnographic research into people’s experience of automated lighting in Melbourne, Australia. In doing so we formulate and argue for an approach to automation that situates it as part of everyday mundane worlds and acknowledges its entanglement with the emergent and experiential qualities of everyday environments as they unfold. We demonstrate this through the example of automated lighting, understood as a situated technology that has contingent effects and participates in the making of particular ways of seeing and feeling the world. We thereby argue for an account of automation that reaches beyond its potential for the management of human (and other) behaviour, to ask how the qualities and affordances of automated technologies might seep out of their intended domains, and create new perceptual and experiential opportunities. In a context where automation is increasingly prevalent in everyday life, such attention to the experience and use of automated technologies which already exist on a large scale is needed. Urban lighting is an example par excellence of automation in the world because it has a long history beyond the recent association of automated technologies with code and digital infrastructures. As scholars debate how automated technologies will become part of our future digital lives, understanding how people live in a lit world offers a starting point for considering how we might live with other anticipated algorithmic forms of automation.