Alevtina Kuzicheva surveys the intense family life that was the one constant of Chekhov’s existence by examining Chekhov’s correspondence with his parents, brothers, sister, and wife.

In this chapter, we begin by examining the term ‘family’ and how it is defined in different contexts. As we examine these different definitions you will come to understand the complexity of ‘family’ and the diverse ways in which families can be defined. We then explore some of the structural and functional definitions of the family before moving towards examining some of the underlying assumptions made about families within wider society, including how these assumptions might position families in educational contexts. Through this exploration, some of your own underlying assumptions may be challenged as you come to understand the importance of educators and families working together to achieve the best educational outcomes for children. The chapter continues by discussing the idea of a subjective definition of families and what this might mean for you as an educator. We then move toward the term ’partnership’ and explore some of the barriers and opportunities to partnership work and how they can be harnessed and/or overcome. The chapter concludes by introducing the notion of innovative partnership work, your role in it as an educator, and the importance of this work in the educational context.

Chapter 5 recounts the story of Giorgio Amendola from his birth in 1907 through the complexities of his family life and politics until his father’s death. His father’s murder and his combative personality ensured that he dismissed liberal Anti-Fascism as hopelessly feeble and, in 1929, he joined the Communist Party of Italy (PCdI). He soon left for Paris and for his education as a party chief in the making, notably from the Machiavellian Palmiro Togliatti, his ‘second father’. Giorgio loved Paris, City of the Revolution; he did not visit Leningrad or Moscow until after 1945. A young working-class woman called Germaine Lecocq, almost the embodiment of Paris, came suddenly into his life in a story of love at first sight. Unlike his parents’ marriage, it remained that way. The couple’s marriage and first full sexual encounter occurred on the prison island of Ponza. Not long afterwards, a daughter was born with some difficulty in Rome; Germaine’s mother arrived and thereafter remained part of their family. Eventually they moved back to Paris, and, after a brief time in Tunisia, they stayed in France until Giorgio crossed the Italian border to become a fighting partisan in April 1943.

The rise in prison populations in the 1980s coupled with the silencing of the voices of those in prison compromised the visibility of some Black writers. Writers who were not incarcerated began to write about the prison experience, especially in terms of its effect on families. Although that trend can be seen earlier and later, the neoconservative 1980s catalyzed the need for a new approach to Black prison writing that would enable prisoners’ stories to be told by family members. At the vanguard of that movement is John Edgar Wideman whose willingness to tell the story of his incarcerated brother changed the trajectory of contemporary African American literature and its intersection with prison writing. This chapter utilizes the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of the carceral archipelago in order to advance a broader literary/cultural critique. Foucault enables us to extend Wideman’s inquiry outward from prison into a series of institutions designed to preserve and promote the idea of racial hierarchy despite mythological national claims of opportunity, democracy, equality, and equal justice for all well after the abolition of slavery and the end of legal segregation.

Chapter 2 implicates how the definition of the Black middle class has evolved over time and how the earlier research underlying such definitions has principally focused on Black married-couple families with children, and largely overlooked those who live SALA lifestyles. Chapter 2 addresses this gap in the literature by interrogating how those within the Love Jones Cohort conceptualize themselves as members of the Black middle class and how they define the Black middle class more generally. Chapter 2 also questions whether the emergence and presence of the Cohort complicates established definitions of the Black middle class. Chapter 2 demonstrates that, in general, those within the Cohort conceptualized middle-classness according to broader definitions of the Black middle class, in terms that align with the scholarship outlining objective, subjective, and a combination of both measures. Chapter 2 documents how education and income are central to the way Cohort members judge their (and others’) middle-class status, and associated subjective measures, such as education-related networks and the lifestyle commodities, as well as activities that a middle-class income provides.

Chapter 6 outlines how the existence of the Love Jones Cohort offers a fresh lens with which to explore the lifestyle characteristics of the Black middle class. Earlier research on the Black middle class – who have often been equated with married-couple families – asserts that they face the ongoing problem of having to stabilize their class position. This can take on one or more forms, including developing and exemplifying behavior patterns and lifestyles appropriate to the middle class. Chapter 6 unpacks the lifestyle strategies and attributes of the Love Jones Cohort and examines how the decision to not marry and instead continue to live alone may impact such attempts to stabilize their class position. Chapter 6 emphasizes that own space and life, freedom, and self-reliance emerge as central aspects of the Cohort lifestyle, as well as situational loneliness. The Cohort places a great emphasis on the human interaction and companionship provided by family, friends, and social networks and discusses how the pressures emanating from family and friends help shape their lifestyles and navigate the ebbs and flows that arise.

In this final chapter, we offer some comparative analysis and tentative concluding comments. We begin with an examination of different aspects of the law and practice of advance directives (ADs) in these jurisdictions, identifying similarities and trends. With this summary of the various connections between these jurisdictions, we then offer some broader reflections on two key features common to Asian jurisdictions, the role of religion and the role of the family. We conclude with a critical examination of this emerging picture of ADs in Asia, arguing that these insights suggest that distinctive patterns of “generative accommodation” are observable as a way of aligning international consensus with localised traditions and expectations in a more nuanced account of the meeting ground between the East and the West.

African American women writers of the 1980s were arguably the beneficiaries of cultural and political phenomena that held sway during the 1970s and 1980s. One of the major tenets and accomplishments of the Black Arts Movement and the Black Aesthetic of the 1960s was the validation of Black voices that came from within Black communities, drew upon the culture of Black communities -- especially the use of music and the vernacular -- and posited the validity, reality, and truth of that culture. Black women writers of the 1980s provide a logical progression from those communal assertions of value and freedom to extending the possibilities for such expression. This chapter considers the contributions of writers such as Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Rita Dove, Octavia Butler, Gloria Nayor, Sherley Anne Williams, and Toni Morrison as writers who extend and liberate creative and cultural possibilities initiated in earlier decades.

Chapter 3 continues the account of the contest between Mussolini and his unapologetically violent new movement and Amendola’s efforts to reform and defend liberal democracy. As a patriot and a liberal, Giovanni was as staunchly anti-Marxist as the sometime Marxist Mussolini had become. But with his armed squads and populist newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, Mussolini’s political recipe was more successful than Giovanni’s purism and rigour. By 1924, Amendola was the leader of the Aventine Secession, a rump of parliamentarians who withdrew from the Chamber of Deputies when Mussolini’s aides murdered their moderate socialist colleague, Matteotti. Amendola maintained his Anti-Fascist leadership until he was assaulted by Fascists in Tuscany in July 1925. After a retreat to Paris and two unsuccessful emergency operations, he died in Cannes in April 1926. While Giovanni was heavily engaged in politics, he continued to wrestle with his relationship with his wife, Eva Kühn, and their four children. Eva went in and out of mental institutions, whether fairly or not. At some point in these years, Giovanni entered into a relationship with the independent Bulgarian-French journalist Nelia Pavlova.

Through his first four decades, Giovanni Amendola strode energetically down the Italian road to liberalism. From his origins in an uncelebrated part of Campania, from a family clinging to the lowest rungs of the middle class, he moved determinedly up and up. En route, there were numerous staging posts: moderate socialism, religion of great variety (but never Catholicism), marriage to a ‘new woman’ from the Romanov empire, pure philosophy, political philosophy, academic life, political journalism, war service with promotion in his country’s officer corps, and then, in November 1919, election to the Chamber of Deputies for one of the seats in the College of Salerno. That first direct step towards political power was followed speedily by appointment to what was the outer cabinet, but with the crucial post-war task of helping to manage Italy’s finances. Within the framework of Italian liberalism, as set in place by the Risorgimento, other young men also emerged into political prominence. But few ranged quite was widely as young Giovanni Amendola.

The chapter explores the background to Churchill’s upbringing and its bearing on his future career. It introduces and contrasts his American Jerome lineage with his aristocratic British Marlborough ancestry before describing the courtship and early married life of Jennie Jerome and Lord Randolph Churchill. Winston’s education is placed in the context of the meteoric rise and sudden collapse of his father’s political career, the family’s financial difficulties and Lord Randolph’s failing health. The chapter finishes with an analysis of Churchill’s family inheritance and concludes that its importance was more social and political than financial.

The family and the château de La Brède, sketch of Montesquieu’s legend and reputation.

Birth (1689) Childhood of Montesquieu at La Brède; his education by the Oratorians in Juilly, when he went by the name of La Brède or Labrède; and what the documents show about his life there through 1705, his developing interests and literary inclinations.