“Animalia Americana” foregrounds an examination and critical analysis of the historical, literary, and theoretical correlations between Blackness and animality to assess how these correlations, specifically the ways in which animals are found “running free” within a Black literature, might guide us toward more ethical practices. This chapter reads Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha as illuminating the dominant strains of how pest animals have appeared in twentieth-century African American letters: Not only as markers of the gratuitous violence which both marks and mars Black life in modernity, but as figures through which Black writers articulate the ways of thinking about feeling, and sociality, that surviving such violence have produced. From the ways in which K-9 police dogs were unleashed upon Black people during the Civil Rights Movement as a violent form of sociopolitical suppression to the significance of animals in Black communal and familial units emblematized through the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club and DMX’s love for his American pitbull terrier, this chapter complicates the relationship between Blackness, animality, and humanity.

This chapter presents an overview of key views on erotic desire and its management as well as common practices and norms in the Greek and Roman worlds from the seventh century BCE to the third century CE. No single canonical text or religious moral code existed that prescribed sexual relations. Instead, we rely on their rich textual and visual culture to reconstruct standards, attitudes, and practices. We know most about the sexuality of elite male citizens since most texts and visual objects were created by and for them. Gender and status were key components in any sexual relations, with the citizen male having the greatest access to partners: wives, sex labourers, other free men and boys, and enslaved people. Sexual virtue was expected of free citizen women and girls, but it may not have excluded sexual relations with other females, at least in the Greek world. The chapter surveys concepts of desire in literature (by genre) and sexual imagery in art (including male, female, and transgender bodies), and considers the everyday practices and experiences of sexuality for free, enslaved, elite, and non-elite. What emerges is a complex and even conflicting view of desire and sexual relations. Rather than a belief system, we more accurately talk about discourses of ancient sexualities.

Ancient Egyptian ideas about sex changed over time in close relation to changes in gender power relations. The comprehensive overview of textual and iconographic sources in this chapter indicates that discourses on sex did exist. Desirable bodies were either depicted or described in poetry. Pleasures could be sought in different sexscapes such as e.g., houses, gardens, streets, festivals, marshes and bathhouses. Festival sex had long history and was connected to the celebration of the return of the wondering Sun Eye goddess. She was pacified through consumption of alcohol and sexual intercourse. Sex-work is also attested, but its closer regulation through taxation does not predate Roman occupation. This is also the period when classical authors such as Strabo, formed the orientalist trope of sacred prostitution in Egyptian temples. However, contrary to this trope, sex is rarely depicted in state sponsored art and is found in media such as ostraca or rock art. Similarly, same-sex intercourse is attested throughout Egyptian history but rarely depicted. Passivity in intercourse between men was looked down upon. It even served as a metaphor to designate enemies of Egypt. Sexual violence was punishable but easily confused with adultery, putting women in precarious positions.

This chapter analyzes the colonial period, taking 1536, the date of the founding of the city of Buenos Aires, as a starting point. It aims to discuss texts linked to the conquest of the River Plate – namely, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Comentarios (1555), Ulrich Schmidl’s Derrotero y viaje a España y las Indias (1567), and Ruy Díaz de Guzmán’s Argentina (1612), among other letters, chronicles, and documents – using water, a key aspect of the spatiality constructed in these works, as a guiding axis for the analysis. This is not aesthetized water, waiting for a contemplative gaze, but water marked by overflow, excessive, water that stagnates, sickens, and stings, overcoming boundaries and impeding the actions of the body attempting to own those lands. In the colonial period, particularly in the texts discussed, a water matrix takes shape which will become the seed of fiction in Argentine literature. The presence of water not as a background or the setting for major events, but as a founding incident of narration, as the main driver of action; a presence which renders spatiality and the bodies traversing it (and enduring it) the keys to the narrative of the River Plate.

This chapter examines litigation related to the appointment of federal judges, including administrative law judges (ALJs). Key issues raised in this litigation include recess appointments, the confirmation process, and whether and how the Appointments Clause applies to non-Article III judges including ALJs. In recent years, most of the litigation over federal judicial selection has concerned the appointment of ALJs.

Beatriz Sarlo’s Escena de la vida postmoderna represents a turning point in literary studies, cultural studies, and media studies in Argentina. Originally published in 1994, it was a major, influential intervention on cultural and media questions that had not been central in literary studies, written by a well-known literary scholar. It represents a shift from “the book” to “the city” as a site of analysis and interpretation of cultural forms. Part urban critic, part flâneur, Sarlo is intrigued by the changing public spaces of Buenos Aires amid a new phase of late capitalism, marked by new forms of consumerism, visual culture, and entertainment. She dissects the meanings and dynamics of cultural expressions that transcend and challenge the power of the written word, and unearths a new Buenos Aires, increasingly dominated by screens, public gatherings in private spaces, youth subcultures, and art forms that echo new developments. The book stands as both a call to fellow literary scholars to foreground nonliterary forms of cultural production and engagement in their work, and as a representation of an important point of reference to “demediatize” the study of communication and meaning-making in order to comprehend the significance of public and popular urban sites.

This chapter will address contrasting ways in which Argentine literature has reflected on, and borrowed from, scientific theories and practices. Many nineteenth-century writers (such as José Mármol, Eugenio Cambaceres, and Lucio V. Mansilla) drew on (pseudo-)scientific discourses to lend legitimacy to their arguments, while others developed a critical approach to the legacies of positivism in Argentina. Dystopian visions of the imbrication of science, technology, and the politics of authoritarianism dominate the twentieth century, in texts that explore the experience of mass society or dictatorship. However, this chapter will also highlight cases of much greater ambivalence, such as that of Roberto Arlt, in whose work the pursuit of science and technology becomes both an instrument of violence and a fount of beauty and liberation. Furthermore, it will construct an important genealogy of authors – from Eduardo Holmberg in the final decades of the nineteenth century through to the contemporary writer Marcelo Cohen – who have conducted innovative metafictional explorations into the relationship between literature and science, and who have understood the porous boundary between them to be a source of great creativity.