Chapter 3, “The People of Constantinople,” tracks population numbers across the centuries together with the factors that contributed to growth and decline. It also examines the ethnic and demographic make-up of the capital’s population.

Chapter 19, “Pilgrimage to Constantinople,” examines the emergence of Constantinople as a sacred center of Christian pilgrimage. It outlines the city’s attractions and considers the motives that drove people to visit.

This chapter traces how queer Indigenous poet Tommy Pico (Kumeyaay) has developed a critique of the “Ecological Indian” trope. While this critique begins most obviously in 2017’s Nature Poem – in which Pico boasts that he “would slap a tree across the face” – I show how he extends and refines this impulse in 2018’s Junk. Junk gestures toward dietary colonization – displacement from ancestral lands and the forced adoption of a Eurowestern diet – as a major force behind Indigenous health problems. But the book also satirizes pervasive trends such as urban “foodiesm” and gay men’s obsession with fitness – developments that, at first glance, seem to offer some corrective to those problems, but which ultimately exacerbate them by imagining eating as a matter of individual choice. Further, Pico resists the utopianism of decolonial dietary discourse, in favor of a perverse celebration of junk food. As I explain, the focus on future generations found in decolonial dietary discourse can be co-opted to pathologize “bad” eating habits and even link them to “bad” parenting. I conclude that Pico believes in the projects of dietary decolonization and Indigenous food sovereignty, but not in the affects or sensibilities they seem to require.

Focusing on Claire Vaye Watkins’s novel Gold Fame Citrus (2015), this chapter explores the dialogue between speculative climate change fiction and ecocriticism. Watkins’s narrative itineraries emplot some well-trodden themes, settings, and motifs of climate change fiction that have to some extent characterized the Anthropocene and the literary genre itself: desertification and extreme weather, toxic landscapes, uncontrollable environments, socio-economic and ecological collapse, the disposability of life, the prospect of extinction, and an imperiled future, all of which have been well theorized in ecocritical discourses. This chapter argues that the novel’s narration of climate change and the Anthropocene reads as theoretically informed, and, as such, anticipates (indeed provokes) its own paradigmatic theorization. What might be provoked in particular by navigating this generic terrain are theories of “reproductive futurism,” nonhuman agency, and scalarity, and, along with them, the opportunity to reflect critically on the limits and possibilities of the theory of climate change fiction, thereby revealing Watkins’s work as a form of meta-critical fiction. What emerges from this novelistic self-reflexivity are ecocritical complicities in the Anthropocene’s reification and histories of environmentally mediated violence and injustice, and the anthropogenesis of environmental catastrophe, otherwise screened by theory.

Chapter 12, “Sacred Dimensions: Constantinopolitan Monasticism,” describes the introduction of monastic communities to the city and ensuing developments in these urban monastic institutions. It considers, in particular, the distinctive nature of Constantinopolitan monasticism, debates about the idea of what monastic living should be, and the ever-evolving relationship between the patriarchate and monastic communities in the period between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries.

Chapter 9, “Residential Constantinople,” considers Constantinopolitan domestic architecture by examining written sources and material remains. It discusses the evidence chronologically and according to social group, distinguishing between the early Byzantine period and the middle and late Byzantine periods to demonstrate that, institutional continuity notwithstanding, the makeup of the residential city and its components changed over time.

Chapter 10, “Commercial Constantinople,” examines the commercial developments in the capital. It concentrates on the city’s commercial topography, its provisioning, trade networks, merchant class, and manufacturing industries as well as government control over them.

Chapter 6, “Constantinople: Building and Maintenance,” considers the built environment of Constantinople as a thermodynamic system, examining such issues as the supply of materials, construction legislation, and architectural techniques in the context of three basic categories: urban infrastructure, public monuments, and vernacular architecture.

Bad Day at Black Rock is a Western set just after the end of World War II. The desert town of Black Rock, teetering on the edges of both a failed frontier and postwar disillusionment, was once home to a Japanese American man named Komako. At Black Rock, Komako had found water where others had failed – and water is worth killing for. After murdering Komako and burying him beside his well, Black Rock masks the deed by claiming Komako had been “shipped off” to an incarceration camp during the war. Examining the layered machinations at play in Black Rock's lie, this chapter turns to earth: it reads the landscape as a vital surround through which Komako and the incarceration of Japanese Americans physically and hauntingly manifest at Black Rock. It links the Western and the West to narratives of Japanese American incarceration, both bound to the settler colonial impulse that seeks to consolidate US power and authority over land, water, and people in the West. Simultaneously indebted to ecocriticism and comparative race studies, this chapter explores the ways Black Rock’s Hollywood Western becomes an incarceration tale – which in turn becomes a narrative of settler colonial eco-imperialism.

Chapter 7, “The Defence of Constantinople,” examines the factors at play in the defense of Constantinople – geography, fortifications, land and naval forces, adequate supply of water and provisions, and, most importantly in the eyes of its inhabitants, the miraculous tutelary powers resident in the God-guarded city.