Athens and the Aegean were at the centre of the economic life of the Greek world in the late archaic and classical period. Like the other cities of the Aegean, Athens actively exploited its territory, but the specific characteristic of its economy was the presence of the Laurium mines, which gave it an unbeatable natural advantage over the other players. In the Hellenistic period, the Aegean cities were only one of the many players on the international landscape, and they had lost their pre-eminence, although to a certain extent the city of Rhodes succeeded Athens in its role of platform for international trade, and the little island of Delos ended in being for a while the main hub of trans-Mediterranean trade.

This chapter shows how, from Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly to Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum, American horror erupts out of the violence performed on indigenous people by white settler society, on people and land on the slavery plantation, and on citizens in the Global South and Middle East during period when the United States has extended and protected American global hegemony. By reading American colonialism and neo-imperialism as central to American extractivist capitalism, the chapter reveals how American horror also narrates the devastating violence done to the planet itself. The chapter observes that much American horror produced by and for white settler society represents settler violence against people and land as justified and regenerative, but it also discusses a number of less reactionary texts that make plain the horrific violence inherent in the capitalist colonial project.

While rarely at the center of debates around censorship in the United States, horror narratives have been profoundly shaped by pressures to constrain their provocative and shocking nature. This chapter explores the history of censorship efforts by government agencies, media companies, and public organizations and the impact they have had on horror across all forms of media. Tracing these efforts across various media, including literature, comic books, motion pictures, radio, and television, this chapter details the various entities that have tried to constrain the horror genre and the ways horror has adapted to these changing conditions. Throughout this historical period, regulatory efforts have consistently sought to limit shocking imagery and as well as restrict the evocation of feelings of shock and horror. Examining this regulatory history gives insights into the dynamic and evolving public dialogue about the limits of social acceptance and how much transgression society can accept.

This chapter investigates the merengue as a tool for unpacking the complicated questions about race and representation in the Dominican Republic. Warning against viewing merengue through essentialist frames, it invites readers to formulate a more heterogenous approach to studying merengue, Dominican identity, and experiences of Blackness.

By distancing creation from nature Christianity rejected freer notions of nature as pagan or pantheist, while imposing a gender hierarchy that rivaled in orthodox fixity creation-from-nothing. Despite the advance of scientific rationalism, Enlightenment culture did not overthrow Christian gender hierarchy. While the ecofeminist movement seized on the liberation of women to bring about ecological change, its agenda stagnated when its activism decreased. Applying a critical-theological reading, this article sees gender hierarchy as subtly read into the Christian exegesis of Genesis rather than flowing from biblical revelation. Acknowledging our current culture as interreligious, it points to two movements forwards, pertaining to gender and creation. First, by locating gender roles in the Trinity, we can loosen the ties with creation and link them to the issue of difference. Second, based on the medieval theological parallelism of nature and scripture one can argue that, in an era where scriptural literacy has lost much of its force, nature can assume a prophetic role. This allows us to reconceive the nature complex insofar as it calls not only for the unity of all creatures as well as of all genders, but ultimately also for the unity of creation with the Creator, what Eriugena called, the unity of all natures.

This chapter analyses the heterogeneous, contradictory and shifting social meanings that salsa music has articulated since its inception in the late 1960s. Shifting from the Nuyorican-grounded urban masculinity and anticolonial politics in its early years to the current globalised and neoliberal spaces of dance studios, this chapter explores how the sounds of salsa, as popular music, become sites for power struggles over cultural, racial, ethnic and gender identities.

This chapter outlines musical orality and musical literacy in the modes of transmission of musical traditions, knowledge and skills within the double island nation Trinidad and Tobago. It begins with a brief outline of some wider music educational tendencies which can in turn provide a lens through which to view music educational policy and practice in Trinidad and Tobago. This is followed by a discussion of some of the central music-making practices found there, their historical foundations, current performance, and respective accompanying manifestations of musical orality and musical literacy in their transmission.

The introduction sets out the chronological and geographical frame as well as the main issues in the study of the ancient Greek economy. It is targeted at a readership with no prior knowledge of the ancient economy and emphasises the importance of understanding economic structures, economic change, and the causes for change. As research on the ancient economy is dependent on theoretical assumptions about the nature and causation of economic change, a special section of the Companion is devoted to the discussion of the most important theoretical approaches to the ancient Greek economy. Other sections treat key themes of the ancient Greek economy, such as taxation, money, markets and labour regimes, as well as network approaches that are currently at the centre of research on ancient economies. A chronologically narrow but geographically wide perspective is taken on the Greek economy, including the Hellenistic economies in Egypt and the Near East but excluding Greek economies in the western Mediterranean and those in the eastern Mediterranean that continued to be dominated by Greek language and culture and therefore still might be termed Greek under the Roman Empire.

Plato’s dialoguesespecially the Republiclead us to wonder what the objects of mathematics are. For Plato, no perceptible three is unqualifiedly three, a necessary condition for being an object of knowledge. Aristotle controversially ascribes to Plato the view that mathematical objects are “intermediates,” between perceptibles and Forms: multiple but also eternal, lacking change, and separate from perceptibles. The hunt for or against intermediates in Plato’s dialogues has depended on two ways of understanding Plato on scientific claims, a Form-centric approach and a subject-centric (semantic) approach. Although Socrates does not present intermediates in the Republic, it is difficult to see how the units of the expert arithmetician or motions of the real astronomer could be simply Forms or perceptibles. The standard over-reading of the Divided Line, where the middle sections are equal, further obscures our understanding. The Phaedo and the Timaeus provide candidates for mathematical objects, although these have only some of the attributes ascribed to intermediates. We are left with no clear answer, but exploring options may be exactly what Plato wants.

Although the motif of the book of nature is an ancient one, it continues to shape our cultural imagination in important ways, not least with respect to how we understand the relationship of science and religion and how we comport ourselves to questions of environmental ethics. Until its early modern transposition into the language of mathematics, the book of nature or liber naturae tradition formed the dominant approach to the interpretation of nature and creation within premodern Christian traditions. At the heart of the premodern idea of the book of nature stood a recognition of the entwined relationship between interpretive practices for the contemplative reading of sacred texts and those for making sense of nature. While this contemplative dimension falls to the wayside in many prominent modern appeals to the book of nature, especially those we associate with early modern science, it later reappears in popular transatlantic forms Christian piety, Romanticism, and nature writing, and arguably plays a significant role in the mediation of the novel moral intuitions about nature we associate with modern environmentalism.

This chapter explores the politics of world music through an analysis of konpa and zouk. The first section provides overviews of both genres, carefully emphasising their creole beginnings. The second section focuses on how globalisation and ‘world music’ marketing have individually and collectively impacted on the two genres over the years.

Schlock horror is excessive, gore-filled, aiming for great effects and intense emotions. It might harbor pretentions to deadly seriousness, but cannot achieve its aim. It usually fails, because something rings untrue, too silly, be it the acting, the scriptwriting, the sets, the too-bright red blood. Schlocky horror has long been a part of the genre, but its presence waxes and wanes across time, according to technological demands within the culture industry or vagaries of fashion. Reversals occur. Artworks that were designed more or less earnestly might come to be seen as schlocky, while artworks designed to become cult objects of bad taste might find themselves elevated into the zone of high art. Any consideration of schlock benefits from an assessment of the longer history of its associated (anti)-aesthetic terms: kitsch and camp – in order to discern how various cultural critics have derived social and political and other meaning from what are often disdained productions.

This chapter examines the way two related genres, science fiction (SF) and the weird, deploy horror to critique the sources and expressions of “American horror” – namely, the dark side of American exceptionalism and the social and environmental consequences of its imperialist projects. The two genres share similar generic genealogies, but they diverge teleologically. SF is built on the assumptions of scientific rationalism and therefore follows an identifiable internal logic, relying on our implicit or explicit belief in the plausibility of the story. The weird, by contrast, is resolutely committed to the inexplicable. Both, however, use horror to disrupt our reliance on realist modes of representation that flatter our epistemological certainties. As such, both SF and the weird have been platforms for colonialist and nationalist imaginations, but both have also been potent vehicles for revealing, resisting, and repairing the brutalities of such imaginations.