This chapter aims to engage with decolonizing turns within the history of medicine as a set of sources and as a discipline and will consider how such readings and pedagogical choices might help us reflect upon a decolonizing turn within the English literary curriculum. Literary sources intersect seamlessly with histories of medicine, science, disability, and emotion. However, it is still possible that history and literature as complementary but starkly different methodologies rarely reflect adequately on one’s disciplinary borrowings from the other. This chapter is an attempt to facilitate such a conversation and knowledge exchange. For my purposes, I define “literature” for the historian in a way that incorporates a broader range of “creative” writing, including ethnography, memoir, psychological or psychoanalytic notetaking, and polemics.

When arriving by boat in Malta from Libya, migrants encounter a strong state and legal framework that shapes their mobilities and journeys. This chapter brings forward migrants’ lives in Malta’s reception structures. It reveals how people experience mobility as a form of stuckness, influenced by bureaucratic techniques of governance.

This chapter opens up space for rethinking the experiences, economies and governance of mobile life. It sheds light on aspects of comparison between migrants’ experiences in the fragmented context of Libya and in Malta’s legal framework, enabled through the book’s unique analytic of the journey. Journeys foster novel understandings of the intersections between economy and unauthorized migration, encapsulated by the concept of mobility economies. The ethnographic and analytical insights of the book furnish a new anthropology of mobility and economic life.

This chapter offers a temporal view on mobility: the ways in which migrants negotiate their longer-term futures in Malta’s state and legal system. Showing how onward movement is constrained by legal status and a bureaucratic landscape, it front stages the importance of the journey as an analytic for theorizing mobility.

Migrants’ journeys are often characterized by immobility and waiting. This chapter describes the experiences of migrants at a house in Libya as they prepare to take a boat to Europe. Furthering analyses of mobility economies, it brings economy into conversation with questions of time and immobility. The chapter reveals how a clandestine economy surrounding mobility intersects with intimate economies that reproduce the mobile body.

Confinement is a prominent feature of migrants’ journeys through Libya and onwards to Europe. Turning to migrants’ experiences in informal sites of confinement and in government-run detention centres in Libya, this chapter foregrounds how forced immobility is a crucial part of processes extracting value from migrants’ lives. Through a dynamic I call ‘accumulation by immobilization,’ the chapter reveals how peoples’ mobilities become a locus for generating value.

This chapter highlights that not all journeys are linear. It turns to the lives of migrants who decide to stay in Libya rather than move onwards to Europe. The chapter foregrounds how migrants navigate informal bordering practices enacted by a range of different actors. It offers a novel analysis of affective labour, as a labour of endurance and coping, and reveals how it plays a pivotal role in the making of peoples’ mobilities.

How might we characterize the unauthorized journeys of migrants from countries in Eastern and Western Africa as they make their way to or through Libya to Europe? This chapter front stages the journey as an analytic for understanding contemporary migration. It outlines what is at stake when the lived experiences of migration and migrants’ lives are brought into conversation with biopolitics and political economy. It highlights the concept of ‘mobility economies’ as a means for recasting analyses of migration and economic arrangements under contemporary capitalism.

The Mediterranean boat crossing highlights vulnerability and risk along migrants’ unauthorized journeys. This chapter attends to migrants’ experiences of taking a boat from Libya to Europe. The chapter enlivens affective and meteorological dimensions of the crossing to show how they configure mobilities and peoples’ futures. It provides a unique insight into unauthorized migration and its intersections with affect and atmospheres.

Chapter 4 mobilizes second-order cybernetics theories that were first adopted in 1960s social sciences as a comparative framework for reading Gertrude Stein’s quasi-ethnographic writing about American culture. Love pairs Stein’s work with writing by second-order cybernetic anthropologists Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and – most extensively – Mary Catherine Bateson. Love illustrates how Stein and M. C. Bateson both employ (a) the term “composition” as a framework for understanding the everyday habits of behavior that constitute American cultural identity, and (b) a combination of seemingly repetitive representational strategies and juxtapositional contexts as platforms for cultivating self-reflexive cultural awareness. They see this perspective as increasingly necessary within the twentieth century’s technologically complex networks that require us to respond in creative and flexible ways to our ever-changing circumstances. The chapter positions Stein’s work in dialogue with emergent social scientific strategies for cultural observation and analysis, and therefore as an important precursor to the anthropology-based theories at the forefront of cybernetics’ second-order turn.

Clifford Geertz was undoubtedly the leading anthropologist of his generation, a broad-scale thinker whose influence extended far beyond his own discipline. His study of Islam in Indonesia, however, might appear not to have been reprised in his Moroccan work whereas, in fact, one could argue that it was. For in his study of the souk, the Moroccan bazaar, Geertz not only presented one of the most detailed and theoretically sophisticated studies of this form of economic structure but also showed how everyday Islamic assumptions and orientations suffuse that domain. In this sense, Geertz did do a study of Moroccan Islam, indeed one that demonstrates its connection to multiple domains of everyday life. In that sense, too, it is the encounters in this most important realm where religion lives and where it must be understood.

This chapter builds on recent scholarship uncovering the ways in which, just as there are modernisms, there are also regionalisms, and the two terms are not flipsides of the modernity coin but the same “side” of its Möbius strip, oscillating between op-position and co-position. More specifically, it focuses on the ways modernist debates over new versions of “culture” reshaped regionalism. New versions of “cultural pluralism,” arising out of interdisciplinary conversations among artists, anthropologists, geographers, and critics, were deployed in opposition to the homogenized, industrial nation-state. In these arguments, deployed by figures such as Randolph Bourne, Horace Kallen, and Edward Sapir, the unit of culture is both local and transnational, arising from the past but crucially oriented toward the future. These intertwined arguments of cultures, regions, and literary form are shared across key “communities of cultural interest” in the period, in particular the Southwest of Mary Austin and Native writers such as John Joseph Matthews and D’Arcy McNickle, and the South(s) of John Crowe Ransom and Zora Neale Hurston.

3. Moscovici’s intellectual ‘age of innocence’ was also the age of uncertainties. Aware that his work did not fit into the current trends in social psychology, he tried not to overstep the expectations of his political and intellectual masters. After all, he was a ‘réfugié et apatride’ (refugee and stateless) until 1958 (Moscovici, 2019, p. 299). This, to my mind, may explain why he hesitated in adopting the idea of ‘cognitive polyphasia’, although throughout the whole of Psychoanalysis, he constantly referred to multifaceted forms of thinking and language.

In contrast to the generally adopted belief that Moscovici’s ancestor in the theory of social representations was Emile Durkheim, there is no evidence of that in the first edition of Psychoanalysis. Moscovici was aware of some of Durkheim’s work but his references to it were negligible.

Focusing on Moscovici’s historical, philosophical, and cultural resources, this chapter shows that, in his ‘age of intellectual innocence’, continental philosophy and anthropology, Marxism, and the psychology of Jean Piaget played a vital role in his development of the theory of social representations. I suggest that there is a remarkable similarity between Moscovici’s ideas and those of Ernst Cassirer, with whose work he was well acquainted.

Scholarship on De Officiis tends to place the emphasis on those aspects of the treatise that outline the building blocks of a functioning commonwealth. What tends to receive rather less attention is Cicero’s theorizing of what to do in situations of communal breakdown. But in De Officiis he is as interested in injustice as he is in justice, in the ability of humans to inflict massive damage on each other, in the insufficiency of legislation to ensure harmonious co-existence, in fraud and abuse of power. To address the problem of harm and injustice Cicero calls for vigilance and intervention on the part of all members of the community and endorses ‘protective violence’ up to and including the license, indeed the duty, to kill tyrannical figures that threaten the fabric of communal life. This chapter argues that Cicero’s ethical extremism animates the entire treatise. To render this claim plausible it explores the historical circumstances that gave rise to it and traces its ubiquitous presence within De Officiis, with a particular focus on the conceptual strategies used to justify murder.