This petition concerned proposals for major re-ordering works to this Grade II listed church, consecrated in 1933. Of particular interest was the fate of two substantial paintings based on Pilgrim's Progress by Norman Adams, installed in 1972, whose removal was required by the main works proposed. Each painting covered a substantial part of one side of the church above the nave arcades. They were described as being of national importance.

Whereas previous criticism of Shakespeare's Sonnets has shown how the early sonnets associate the fairness of an elite young man with the dynastic legitimacy and aesthetic refinement that would come to signify the superiority of racial whiteness, this essay considers certain later sonnets that compromise and threaten to revoke whiteness as a mark of racial privilege. Darkening the friend's complexion, these poems—numbers 27–28, 33–35, 43, 58, 93, and 119–20—materialize him as a nocturnal shadow; stain his lovely face with black clouds, smoke, mud, wrinkles, and ink; and associate his sexual estrangement from the speaker with the torments of blackest hell. By darkening the promiscuous aristocratic friend, these later sonnets suggest that racial fairness is not simply an ontological fact—a stable epidermal sign of aristocratic lineage—but a fluctuating sign contingent on interpersonal value judgments, or an “affective epistemology.”

How should we conceive of conflicts that seem intractable? Is there any hope of a resolution? We observe impasses between various groups concerning the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, the Movement for Black Lives and racial conservatives, and Indigenous voices versus settler colonial states. Some aspects of these impasses can surely be explained by an unwillingness by one or more parties to the conflict to yield any ground. Might there also be room for misunderstanding generated by radically different ways of conceiving the world? According to the different worlds thesis, people come to radically different understandings of the world because they inhabit incompatible conceptual realities. In this article, I endeavor to explore possible ways of understanding the thesis and its potential impact on certain normative practices we tend to take for granted.

Human capacity to explore and shape outer space will increase substantially over the next 50 years. Yet, International Relations (IR) theory still treats outer space as an isolated, unique, or inconsequential realm of political life. This paper moves IR beyond its ‘terrestrial trap’ by theorising planetary politics as inherently embedded in relations with environments and actors that are located beyond Earth. To face the momentous and often alarming political developments taking place in outer space, from space militarisation to space colonisation, we challenge two of IR’s terrestrial biases. First, we confront the assumption that developments in international relations take place only or primarily on Earth. We show how the historically constituted ideologies and political economies of colonisation and domination are extended to – but also transformed within – outer space exploration and settlement. Second, we challenge the notion that developments in outer space form a logical extension of politics as it has emerged on the habitable surface of our planet. We move beyond zones of human habitation and explore how the material conditions of space intersect with situated histories of political governance and control. By analysing politics beyond Earth, we retool IR theory to confront an extraterrestrial political future.

This article offers an analysis of the embodied speaking voice of Audre Lorde over the span of nearly two decades publicly performing her poems aloud. Drawing from interdisciplinary methodologies to analyze archival recordings from across Lorde's performance history, I argue that Lorde developed a series of vocal techniques—shifting vocal registers, demanding silence from her audience, singing with vibrato, and performing with a communal timbre—that distinguish her from her contemporaries in the Black Arts movement. Lorde's vocal practice was anchored in the aesthetics of the black church but also deeply fashioned by her queerness, a combination that challenged the default heterosexuality within normative genealogies of black sound. Though Lorde's essays are central to affect theory and her poetic voice is often described as polyvocal, I argue that the material aspects of Lorde's poetic performance practice situate her as a prescient theorist of sound and affect.