This chapter challenges the idea that rural communities have “declined.” It argues that the term, “decline,” discounts how laws and policies have actively facilitated rural marginalization and socioeconomic distress for decades. “Decline” reframes an active phenomenon as one that occurred passively, making current rural challenges seem natural and inevitable. The chapter assesses how twentieth- and twenty-first-century federal and state laws and policies undermined traditional rural livelihoods in agriculture, natural resource and energy development, and manufacturing. The chapter then provides a legal history of transportation and telecommunications deregulation, and the role deregulation played in exacerbating geographic inequality. Overall, the chapter proposes that instead of declining, rural communities have been undermined, as policymakers have consciously traded rural welfare for some other perceived benefit. While those trade-offs may have afforded tangible societal benefits in some fashion, the decline framing discounts how rural communities were in fact knowingly sacrificed in the name of the greater good.

The apocalyptic is at the core of the vernacular vision of Islam disclosed in the mystical poetry of Nund Rishi. There is nothing unusual about this as the apocalyptic genre is fundamental to all Abrahamic religions. Even more significantly, it is Nund Rishi's shruks on the apocalyptic that endure the most in Kashmiri cultural memory and have passed on into the Kashmiri language as proverb and prophecy. The apocalyptic mode in Nund Rishi's mystical poetry, it is useful to recall, emerges at a distinct historical moment in medieval Kashmir: a time of transitions from the rule of independent Hindu kings to the establishment of a Muslim sultanate and the beginning of religious conversions to Islam in the region. A close reading of the shruks that deal with the apocalyptic material reveals a translated, and vernacular, apocalyptic in Nund Rishi's mystical poetry that mediates relations between pre-Islamic and Islamic eschatology.

A traditional Muslim apocalyptic is deployed by Nund Rishi and hurled against the political structure of his time (the new Muslim sultanate ruled by the Shahmīrī dynasty). But the elements of a traditional Muslim apocalyptic are also displaced on to metaphors of a sudden inner transformation. The catastrophe of end times intimates hope of a new life. There is a tension in the shruks that deal with the apocalyptic between a traditional Muslim apocalypse and a Sufi apocalypse. This is true of much Islamic mystical poetry, but what is unique in Nund Rishi's apocalypticism is that the coming hour of reckoning (the Islamic qiyāmah, or qayāmat in Urdu and Kashmiri) is seen not as the end of history (individual or eschatological) but as the end to an unjust political order in history. Even though the currency of Nund Rishi's apocalyptic shruks in popular memory owes much to enduring cycles of violence in Kashmir's recent history, Nund Rishi's apocalypticism is best approached as the translation of classic Islamic eschatology (traditional Muslim apocalyptic) into the Kashmiri vernacular. The preponderance of the theme of the apocalyptic in Nund Rishi's mystical poetry is also conspicuous because other key Islamic eschatological themes such as the Prophet's mystical ascension to heaven, mi’rāj, do not appear so significantly in the Nund Rishi corpus.

This chapter addresses in detail those rare occasions in which the Court and the Commission have adopted differing positions on the legal questions before them. In exploring both the potential for such disagreements and how they have been handled, the chapter shows that these instances attest to the strength of the inter-institutional relationship rather than undermine it. It also points out, however, that harmony comes at a cost.

History and Bengali Selfhood

The writing of history will always seek out narratives. If one were to look around the cultural, social, religious, or economic tropes scattered across the nineteenth-century Bengali society, it would not be difficult to discover the many reconstructivist narratives that define what may be described as ‘threshold moments’2 in the history of the Bengali people. So many of these narratives employ, implicitly or explicitly, tropes of representation that may be read through lenses of globality, global intellectual history, the world historical, or the universalist, and put into critical categories that bring out differential moments of enunciation which may be interpreted variously. Similarly, while some historians and commentators will tend to read nineteenth-century Bengal as one whole block divided into separate but connected narratives, others would discover a more well-defined disjunction between the first and second parts of the century. Likewise, both the principles of reconstruction and the way the ethos of the Bengali people were interpreted may be seen as different ways of reading history. Or, in other words, different ways of framing a narrative. As I have tried to understand in the last chapter, Akshay Dutta's intervention as both an object and an agent of history involved a rather complicated cultural politics due to his interstitial location within bhadralok Calcutta society, the contingent and unfinished nature of his academic training, and what one might call a certain ideological evasiveness that refused nomenclatures, boundaries, or categories. With time, the debates on representation became more fraught and by the middle of the century, the principles of reconstruction or avenues of representation were complicated by too many interconnections, cross-currents, and hermeneutic challenges that were not easy to grapple with: the modern and non-modern debate; the good and evil of imperialism; the principles of education; nationalism and its manifestations, and the corresponding idea of swadesh; religion, religious practice, and debates on conversion – to name a few. Out of these debates and discussions emerged the question of selfhood, of fashioning the self as a representative body of Bengali (or sometimes national) identity and defined within a moral or cultural register that had a commensurate relationship with modernity.

Chapter Three explores the views of former officials regarding compliance by states with international law. Almost all former officials believed that international law constrains state behavior, at least to some extent, and that states comply with international law much of the time. The top positive factors favoring compliance, as revealed by frequency counts, were reputational concerns; state interest in a stable legal and institutional system; reciprocity, or the prospect of retaliation; ethical considerations, including ethical values underlying international law rules and respect for the rule of law; idiosyncratic factors, including the history and culture of states; and benefits flowing from participation in specific regimes. The significant role of ethical factors gives a boost to normative theories about compliance. The role of systemic interests illustrates the benefits of a multilateral, institutional, and rule-based system. Among the factors militating against compliance, the dominant factor was state interest. Many former officials suggested that decisions about compliance involve a cost–benefit assessment, a consideration of many factors including international law. The chapter concludes by considering the former officials’ perceptions about the reasons that states outside of the United States take into consideration regarding compliance with international law.

Computer simulations have played a crucial role in modern cosmology, a role anticipated and pioneered by F. Hoyle. Their interrelation with theory and observation is invaluable in developing theoretical positions, testing general features of isotropy and homogeneity at various scales, and probing the anomalies. The simulations also make up for the inability to experiment with different structures of the universe and substantially different physical universes. Yet various selection effects and the numerical intractability of certain alternative explanations limit the value of simulations. This is a serious epistemic worry that can be addressed with the lessons learned from the alternative explanations of the CMB.

After decades of exponential growth, China has transformed from a stagnant, impoverished autarky to the world’s second-largest economy highly integrated into global supply chains, and numerous Chinese firms have embarked on overseas business expansion on an unprecedented scale. Against that backdrop, many Chinese investors have ventured into the highly competitive, strategically important US market. Though the recent geopolitical confrontation between the two countries has hampered the investment flow, many large Chinese investors have been hesitant to withdraw from the US market. How do Chinese investors negotiate the omnipresent and consequential legal risks and opportunities in the United States? This question, which holds great practical, policy, and theoretical importance, has received scant scholarly attention. This chapter lays out the road map of the book that attempts to provide the answers.

In Satire 1.6, Horace depicts himself as a private citizen free to move around as he wishes in opposition to another character who does not enjoy such freedom of movement, owing to the fact that he is a politician. Seneca, in De clementia (perhaps recalling Horace), extols the freedom of movement he enjoys in the urban space thanks to the emperor, who, on the contrary, complains about the limitations imposed on him by his role. In Xenophon, Hiero, who was a private citizen before becoming a tyrant, is questioned by Simonides about the joys and woes of the two conditions: private citizens can go anywhere, while for tyrants everywhere they go is like travelling in enemy territory. In Horace’s sermo, the concrete space of the city refers to a potentially open political space: the figures we see moving around the streets of Rome are free to choose between political abstention and participation on the basis of their own personal inclinations. But the political and social situation was uncertain and unstable. Situations and characters tend in fact to transcend their immediate concreteness, referring to something else as well: something suited to satisfying the search for a principle of authority.

A locus desperatus is, in text-critical terminology, a passage which we deem irremediably corrupt. In these instances, we use cruces and keep hoping for a salvific stroke of genius. It is one of the paradoxes of the Roman Empire that, along with its borders, it kept shifting the criteria for their perception. To the more sensitive minds of the age, the expansionary drive of the Romans opened up many a locus desperatus, where hitherto the simple formats of order, coherence and accessibility obtained. The Augustans do not simply mend the sore spots on the imperial map that have become illegible. Rather, they point to them and, at times, even indicate the way that this drive into vague infinity could be steered: through concentration and the creation of spaces which, in their concrete and sensual materiality, seem to counteract the vacuous phrases of a propagandist territorial politics. If we believe Suetonius, one man cannot be blamed for the vacuity of such an ideology: Augustus himself. Not only does he prove to be a careful reader and interpreter of his own destiny, intent on every single letter; in his last days, we also see him operating according to the improvised rules of a topopoetics whose phantasmagorical productivity is adumbrated in the famous deathbed words: ‘Life: a mime!’ This begs the question: how Augustus-like were the Augustans, and how Augustan was Augustus?

De Tocqueville helps us see American democracy as a way of life shaped by individualism and a dislike of theatrical display. In John Adams, the ideals of Protestant Christianity and Roman republicanism collided. Adams believed in personal integrity, but was unashamed to perform a social role, inspired by the Roman republican orator Cicero. In the nineteenth century Hugh Blair repositioned rhetoric as a way to speak truth, in a language that in practice confined truth-speaking to the elite. When working-class Irish Americans sought a more inclusive democracy, they found a symbolic representative in the actor Edwin Forrest, and many died in the ensuing riot outside a new opera house in 1849. Black Americans first found a public voice through the person of Frederick Douglass, whose oratory was founded both on preaching and on the old flamboyant republican tradition. Women first demanded a voice in the context of Quakerism and the campaign to abolish slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton later argued for female suffrage in terms that were more secular, more individualist and ultimately more elitist.

This chapter examines how cheap, handy, and accessible print formats facilitated the growth and development of American genre writing throughout the twentieth century. From horror stories to science fiction, popular genres took root in pulpwood magazines targeting working-class male readers who lived in industrialized areas. Paperback books became the primary format by which genre writing was marketed to a mass readership. Whether in magazine or book form, the appeal of pulp fiction may be attributed to the serial plots and sensationalized storytelling that came along with ephemeral print media. But it also may be attributed to their masculinist perspectives and racial and ethnic stereotyping narrative strategies that reinforced the prejudices of its presumed readership of white men. The chapter tracks the representation of anti-Asian and anti-Black sentiment in pulp fiction from the early twentieth century to the Black Power era. It explains how such sentiment reflected nativist and imperialist ideologies of difference, and it ends with a consideration of how writers of color have sought to diversify popular genres by writing against the pulp traditions they have inherited.

This chapter provides an overview of the interactions among language, cognition, and social context by examining how individuals with different language abilities and varying language proficiencies respond to assorted social-communicative demands. The analysis of the social context reveals how local (e.g., language register use) and global (e.g., culture, socioeconomic status) changes affect children’s cognitive control and language performance, as indicated by neural and behavioral findings. Social context at the local level is more dynamically changing than the context at the global level, which is more predictable. Children rely on different cognitive control functions in neutral, cooperative, and competitive social contexts. They adapt their cognitive system more efficiently in cooperative and competitive contexts, compared to a neutral one. Children’s behavior across these social situations is most strongly influenced by their age, cultural background, socioeconomic status, language skills, and emotion regulation.