This chapter illuminates how camp conceives reading in affective terms. Camp diminishes the intensity of strong affects, such as shame, anxiety, and rage, to make room for relief, laughter, and even sexual interest. In this way, camp protects queer eroticism from being snuffed out by a wide range of phobic discourses. While scholars often oppose camp to sexual desire, I trace different orientations to eroticism that arise in in lesbian, queer of color, and trans camp. As examples, I turn to three camp touchstones, Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack (1928), Tommy Pico’s Junk (2018), and Torrey Peters’ “CisWorld (2019), which each seduce readers into scenes of pleasure. For these writers, campiness does not deflate queer and trans desires but makes them narratable and available for readers. In doing so, these texts demonstrate how camp dreams of a queerer social order, and it shields these fantasies from the suffocating forces of white supremacy and cis-heteronormativity. Making affective scenes for queer fantasy, I conclude, is a powerful if still under-appreciated force of camp’s poetics and politics.

This chapter begins with a familiar antithesis: the opposition between the lyric poem and the novel. If the former seems to be characterized by the capture of a single instant, the expression of subjective thoughts and emotions, and a reaching after eternal truths, the latter seems instead to move through time, to fictionalize the objective world, and to be caught in the social and political webs of real life. This chapter challenges this received wisdom by considering the hybrid genre of the verse-novel and by taking as its chief case study George Meredith's 1862 verse-novel Modern Love. Meredith's work simultaneously dissolves and highlights the borders of the single poem, forcing readers to reconsider the relationship of the individual lyric to a larger whole, to the narrative threads running through that whole, to other individual poems, and to other generic alternatives. The chapter concludes by arguing that, because the act of reading verse-novels is often so self-conscious, the genre productively questions ideas of singularity and of self-sufficiency.

This paper examines social and cultural contexts of consumption by bringing together notions of space and place, chiefly the social setting in which Sidonians used Greek pots. Earlier studies placed primary value on the morphology of this pottery with fine fabrics and decoration that attracted scholarly attention and was thought to have been similarly perceived in the past. We question here the use of Greek vessels as commodities of value, enhanced by their origin from a distant place and their rare representation in the eastern Mediterranean, and explore them as artefacts of special symbolism due to their contexts of consumption that has ritual implications.

The significance of emotions is often implicitly addressed in norm research. Some International Relations (IR) scholars, for example, suggest a regulatory function of emotions when it comes to norm-based behaviour, norm compliance, norm persuasion, and norm contestation. Yet, the literature on norms often takes these affective dynamics for granted without making them explicit. This contribution seeks to address this imbalance by examining the relationship between emotions (as moral value judgements) and norms (as collective expectations about appropriate behaviour). Specifically, we extend the current analytical focus by proposing a framework for the empirical investigation of emotional resonance in norm research. We argue that emotional resonance is crucial to the impact and enforcement of international norms because emotions assign specific value to norms within normative orders. We identify pathways and build bridges between norm research and research on emotions in IR and develop a theoretical model to show how emotional resonance is helpful for explaining failures of norm compliance. The way in which the absence of emotional resonance facilitates non-compliance is illustrated by the example of the Bush administration’s reaction to torture allegations in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

The Neutron Activation Analysis of some of the earliest Greek pottery used in the Aegean and the Mediterranean provided results that did not allow the localisation of origin through evidence obtained from the analysis of reference material such as clays and kiln wasters. However, the grouping of our sampled pottery with other members of large geochemical groups allows their localisation through archaeological criteria such as ceramic distribution and concentration patterns. Furthermore, the geochemical groupings contribute to a better understanding of the organisation and economy of pottery production. This is achieved by means of new evidence about the continuity or discontinuity in the use of the same raw material, the correlation of certain pottery types and geochemical signatures and the typological-technological consistency of the newly formed groups.

Chapter 13 discusses neural networks and deep learning; included is a presentation of deep convolutional networks that seem to have a great potential in the classification of medical images.

The historical discourse of Antioch cannot be divorced from that of its twin-sister Seleucia, founded in the same year and dynamically linked to the city on the Orontes.

A richer, better-resolved dataset allows both ‘social’ and ‘ecological’ perspectives to be explored in greater detail than is possible for earlier periods. Themes discussed include regionalisation in material culture, the development of formal burial, shifts in exchange networks, changes in landscape use and subsistence, fluctuations in regional demography, and potential indicators of socio-economic intensification. This last point raises the question of how ‘complex’ southern Africa’s hunter-gatherer societies were and whether social and/or environmental constraints inhibited the emergence of food production using indigenous resources. Recent improvements in dating now offer the possibility of drawing southern Africa’s rich hunter-gatherer rock art into temporally anchored conversations with other components of the archaeological record. The chapter shows that Bushman ethnography strongly supports interpretations of that art in terms of beliefs and practices associated with shamanism, but that new theoretical work (notably studies employing the ‘new animism’) and further work on gender and initiation continue to expand how it can be understood.

The late nineteenth-century Wilson cloud chamber experiments found that the presence of ions caused water vapor to nucleate at lower saturation ratios than in air free of ions. The classical theory of ion-induced nucleation is based on the Thomson model of an ionic droplet, in which an ionic core is surrounded by liquid of the condensing substance. A potential difference exists between the ionic core and the droplet surface, which introduces an electric work term into the Gibbs free energy of cluster formation. This term leads to the existence of stable prenuclei that are smaller than the critical size clusters and more abundant, at steady state, than the bare ions. With assumptions otherwise the same as in CNT for neutral self-nucleation, an expression can be derived for the steady-state rate of ion-induced nucleation. Deficiencies of this theory, in addition to those of CNT for neutral self-nucleation, include that it neglects the effect of the ion on condensation rate constants. Moreover, the theory predicts that the sign of the ion makes no difference in the nucleation rate, in contradiction to the results of most experimental studies for various substances.

This essay traces the histories of sexual, gender, and racial queerness in works from and about the South, and it insists that anything we might see as uniquely “southern” is still profoundly entangled with the literatures and cultures of the United States and beyond. While there are unequivocally southern works of queer literature, it is crucial to recognize that so many queer southerners are the authors, not the others of the wider queer canon, including works that would seem to have nothing to do with the South at all. But this essay does not stop at simply mapping the complex terrain of queer literature by White, Black, and Native American writers associated with the South. The second half turns to the “dirty south”—a term that is rooted especially in hip hop culture and is always already queer, even when texts do not claim queerness as their center. The dirty south has a long and rich cultural history that unearths complex relations among, bodies, pleasures, and the elements they divulge, making it a new source of aesthetic inspiration for reevaluating the multiracial, multigendered south(s) of the past and building a diverse and insurgent southern culture for the future.

This chapter looks at the profound advances made over the past two decades or so in our understanding of modern human origins, of how humans lived in southern Africa during Marine Isotope Stages 6−4, and of their cognitive capacities. While genetics and palaeontology cannot establish a central role for southern Africa in H. sapiens’ emergence, the region provides the most detailed early evidence anywhere for a wide range of complex behaviours that speak to the cognitive abilities of those responsible for them: art, jewellery, bone tools, archery, pigment manufacture, pyrotechnology, snaring and trapping of small game, etc. Much of this material is associated with the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort industries and the significance of this is discussed along with how southern Africa’s record relates to the wider Palaeolithic context in Africa and Eurasia. While underlining the importance of sites like Blombos, Border Cave, Klasies River, Pinnacle Point, and Sibhudu, the chapter emphasises the limitations of (near-)coastal/Fynbos Biome-oriented research and the increasing importance of fieldwork in other regions, such as Namaqualand, the southern Kalahari, and highland Lesotho.

This chapter approaches the concept of the poem through the recitation of oral praise poetry in interpersonal exchanges and in an increasingly textual world. Blending literary history, textual analysis, and autoethnography, the chapter illuminates a decolonial approach to the poem, shifting from an emphasis on the individually authored work to the value of shared practice. Through a close analysis of nhetembo dzemadzinza, a genre of oral clan praise poetry central to Shona-speaking people in Zimbabwe and its environs, the chapter considers the function of poems in rites of passage, affirmations of kinship, and erotic exchanges, while also affirming the interpretive acumen of collectives rather than individuals. The chapter then addresses the reimagination of nhetembo by poets who, living in the diaspora, seek nevertheless to claim a nonhierarchical, decolonializing set of social relations.

At the turn of the century as the western frontier came to a close, America expanded its reach across the Pacific and in so doing solidified a burgeoning modern gay identity steeped in imaginations of the “Orient.” Pacific Islanders and Asian immigrants themselves in fact played a crucial role by illustrating a different way of being to western writers such as Joaquin Miller and Charles Warren Stoddard, even as they were appropriated in bohemians’ explorations of their own same-sex sexuality.