‘Independence’ for bantustans was universally rejected by the international community in
the late 1970s and early 1980s. How the status of Lesotho and Swaziland as
internationally recognised states deeply embedded in South Africa’s economic and
political orbit differed from that of the bantustans was clear in some cases, murky in
others. The a…[Read more]

The Irish Sea which separates Great Britain and Ireland has often been written about in terms of divisions, threats, and hazards. Facing each other across that sea, the coast of Wales and Ireland’s eastern seaboard have a more complex story to tell, one characterised by intimate if troubled lines of connection. A place of passage for centuries, t…[Read more]

Two sections of a book comparing creation myths from ancient Greece and Rome with their Japanese counterparts from the early 8th Century Kojiki (古事記, “Records of Ancient Matters”). These fusion essays are summations of previous book sections by Greek and Japanese authors on the elements of fire and air, respectively, and, drawing from Plato and J…[Read more]

How could the ideal of a universal brotherhood of mankind be realized in an age of nationalism, colonialism and culture wars? “With God, for fatherland and humanity?” is the first comprehensive study of masonic internationalism. It explores, with a focus on England, France, Germany, and Italy, how European masonic associations promoted or opposed…[Read more]

The “Spanish influenza” pandemic that struck Egypt in fall 1918 resulted in the death of eleven out of every one thousand people. Despite the mass suffering caused by the pandemic, it has been largely ignored by historians. I describe how the Egyptian public health service was unprepared for a major health crisis because resources were red…[Read more]

Der Vergleich der Auswirkungen der Französischen Revolution auf die Literatur und Kultur in Polen und in den deutschen Staaten ist sehr schwierig. Die polnischen Schriftsteller und Denker der ersten und zweiten Romantikergeneration sind zu spät geboren worden, um Zeugen der Französichen Revolution zu sein. Für die Älteren, wie Kazimierz Brod…[Read more]

Pirate radio still flourishes in dense, multiethnic cities such as Brooklyn, New York, despite the rise of Web radio. For immigrants in particular, radio sounds mark identity and community and (re)claim social spaces of work, commutes, and the home. It is not only lack of access to digital technologies or broadband that shapes radio’s relevance, b…[Read more]

This study explores Jamaican popular music’s changing engagement with globally networked media technologies. It combines ethnographic analysis of the street dance as a site of urban poor and Black resistance to colonial institutions with an analysis of song lyrics about video cameras at street dances. Newly networked technologies for circulating…[Read more]