The chapter analyses how trade agreements balance liberalisation of digital trade with cybersecurity concerns. The chapter identifies the strengths, weaknesses, and ambiguities facing digital trade regulation in these agreements. As a way to address the tension between international trade law and cybersecurity, it examines security exception clauses in different trade agreements. It also analyses the efforts found in recent regional trade agreements to direct state parties to have regard to international standards concerning cybersecurity issues. It concludes that harmonisation of such standards would suggest the possibility of a greater coherence in cybersecurity governance.

The Introduction positions this book as part of the new critical move to map and interrogate crime fiction’s transnationality. The main point is to combine a sustained focus on individual texts and their particular local and national contexts with a broader, comparative approach that explores the ways in which the translation, circulation and reception of crime fiction within the Mediterranean basin produces a more complex portrait of the genre than would be possible if one just focused on national crime fictions as discrete entities. This chapter argues that by considering southern European, northern African and eastern Mediterranean crime fiction as part of a common tradition, and more importantly giving each component equal significance, this book contributes to the debate about the Western and Eurocentric dimension of world literature. This introduction also argues that, for the relatively limited dimension of the region as opposed to the global, a regional approach is able to give close attention to particular languages and specific texts, while at the same time providing ‘peripheral literature’ with more critical mass and cultural power.

The eighteenth and early nineteenth century encompassed rapid political, social, and economic changes in the Atlantic world. The French Revolution and French expansionism under Napoleon Bonaparte accelerated the restructuring of the Hispanic world. Unfortunately, Spain had to navigate the challenging international period without the great enlightened monarch Carlos III (1759–1788), who had presided over a major intellectual transformation in the Spanish world. Ironically, for much of the period Spain and France cooperated to thwart British naval power in the Atlantic and its territorial ambitions in the Americas. The alliance devastated the Spanish economy and led to the defeat of the Spanish navy at Trafalgar.2 These disasters provoked public discontent, allowing anti-French factions in Spain to force the abdication of Carlos IV in March 1808. When Fernando VII became king, French troops were already on Spanish soil since his father had given Napoleon permission to cross Spain and occupy Portugal.

This chapter will provide the clarification of the origin, nature, and identify forms of political patronage in Vietnam. First, the authors present the origin of patronage in the context of Vietnamese culture and history; emphasizing the element of feudalism, Confucianism and culture-villageoise. After that, the authors analyze patronage appointments in contemporary Vietnamese politics, in light of its specific institutional dynamics. Finally, the chapter provides various typical case studies for the classification of patronage according to the models of Peters (2021).

This chapter examines the seldom-discussed poetry and editorial activities of Norman Macleod, a Southwest-based poet who had strong ties to both influential modernists of an earlier generation such as Ezra Pound and Harriet Monroe, and the younger generation of communist-affiliated writers gathered around the little magazine New Masses. Macleod was an internationally visible figure during the Depression decade, when he published in many prominent venues and released two collections of poetry, Horizons of Death (1934) and Thanksgiving before November (1936). The chapter analyzes Macleod’s poems alongside his editorial activities to argue that Macleod challenged modernity’s developmentalist logic as he cultivated a regionalist aesthetics that positioned the Southwest – particularly its Chicanx and Indigenous cultures – as holistic, vital, and integrated, in contrast to the alienation and destruction he associated with the cities of the East. The chapter also scrutinizes the tendency of Macleod’s work toward cultural appropriation in its quasi-ethnographic relationship with the cultures of the Southwest.

Since its accession to the WTO twenty years ago, China’s image has shifted from a good student aspiring to assimilate itself into the multilateral trading system to one that is increasingly alienated from key WTO principles. How has China’s perspective on WTO been evolving? What are the reasons behind China’s changing perspective? This chapter addresses these questions from the Chinese perspective with a comprehensive analysis of the key moments in China’s first two decades in the WTO, followed by practical suggestions on how to engage China more constructively in the WTO and beyond.

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.

Radio historians observe that Midwestern accents defined the sonic norms of broadcast speech in the United States, and that “BBC English” became a “supra-local accent” that transformed the speech patterns of a small group into an imperial standard. Does literary modernism follow the same model? This chapter takes up the theoretical writings around “broadcast modernism” to write a regionalist theory of poetic modernism in the US. I read backwards from Lorine Niedecker’s desire for “speech without practical locale,” to bring together Niedecker, Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and T. S. Eliot as Midwestern modernists whose compositions on, about, and for the radio produced work on speech that tune us into regional differences against the modernist ideology of radio’s “voice from nowhere”: the ambition of acoustic engineering, corporate infrastructure, and presidential speech. Anticipating the myth of the “neutral” Midwestern media voice, these poets’ work reveals the provincialism in modernism’s cosmopolitan desires.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

From the local color boom to university multiculturalism, the minority short story has been central to transformations bringing new classes of writers and content into American letters. This chapter outlines the promises and failures of the form to racially democratize the literary marketplace. It highlights the possibilities minority writers developed within these limitations. Zora Neale Hurston, Zitkála-Šá, and Winnifred Eaton deflected White audiences and their ethnographic expectations. Their frame tales challenged framings by White gatekeepers. Their feints force scholars to rethink autoethnographic fictions as savvy ethnographies of White audiences. These strategies persist in the multicultural era with writers such as Rattawut Lapcharoensap and Edward P. Jones. However, the short story has shifted from a commercial to an educational form: the easily teachable nugget of diversity. Meanwhile, audiences for ethnic authenticity now include many highly educated minorities. Sandra Cisneros, Nam Le, and others navigate this shifting map, revealing new freedoms and constraints.

Even when valorized for a political imagination that drew attention to the marginalized spaces and communities of a rapidly changing postbellum United States, regionalism (or “local color”) literature was long considered to be merely minor: written from and about sites marginal to the centers of culture and power, primarily by women, and appearing most prominently in the modest form of the short story or sketch. This essay reframes the regionalist short story through a renewed attention to its environmental representation, especially by attending to the genre’s questions of scale: the relation between region, nation, and globe; modernity and its relationship to a preindustrial past; the limitations and constraints of a minor form. Through discussions of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Murfree, Bret Harte, and others, this essay argues that the regionalist short story’s environmental imagination decenters the human, while also revealing the co-constitution of a region and its literary archive.

The short story remains at heart of southern literature. Anthologies, surveys, and criticism all tout the centrality of the form to the representation of the region. But the short story form does not merely facilitate a focus on diverse, local southern cultures. Because short stories can be easily republished and collected, these “little postage stamps” also allow such diverse, local cultures to circulate broadly. In examining the ways short fictional forms enable access to and communication with far-flung places, this chapter offers case studies of three accomplished short story writers: Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Oscar Cásares. Theirs is a literature of the provinces that is far from provincial – a regional literature par excellence that remains very much engaged with the broader world.

This chapter documents the ways in which discourses of heresy and orthodoxy were anchored in wider social beliefs and mentalities about the sacred and profane nature of places, holy and unholy regions, the divine curse, and the devil’s role in society. To illustrate this connection between regionalism and heresy, the chapter analyses al-Fasawi’s ninth-century history which hosts a section dedicated solely to discourses of heresy against Abu Hanifa and the region he settled in, Kufa. We see vividly how proto-Sunni traditionalists established a link between unholy regions and heresies.

The book has shown how the unchanging mission of the Dominican Order has played out in the life of the English Province when stamped in the wax of different ages and cultures marked by the temperaments of particular individuals. Through a return to the primary sources, by removing the filters of an earlier hagiography or narrow regionalism, the books establishes patterns of growth and decline, and identifies the primary forces at work in those patterns. Where the early chapters show especially what was owed to lay patrons, later chapters show what was owed as well to Dominicans such as Cardinal Howard, Thomas Worthington, Dominic Aylward, Bede Jarrett and Vincent McNabb. Lay benefactors changed across the centuries. While the founding medieval benefactors were figures close to the royal courts, the patrons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were recusant nobles with little relationship to the court after the ‘Glorious Revolution’. The major lay benefactors after the mid-nineteenth century came from the newly wealthy.

Chaucer efficiently mimics northern English dialect in the Reeve’s Tale, and critics tend to see these imitations as attempts by the poet at linguistic realism or comedy, but Chaucer uses the North of England as setting in four of the eight stories from the Canterbury Tales that arguably take place on English soil. Chaucer does not view the North simply as a cultural “other”; he knew the region well through his own travels and through the many political relationships he maintained during his career as a bureaucrat. Chapter 4 argues, then, that while Chaucer engages base northern stereotypes at the surface of the Reeve’s Tale, this engagement betrays a more pronounced northern consciousness in Chaucer’s work than critics have previously noticed. Critics are not wrong to discuss Chaucer as a European author, but, this chapter contends, we must also recognize him as an English poet who understood the complex negotiations of nation that were taking place in England in the late-fourteenth century.

Chapter 5 investigates the fifteenth-century ballad A Gest of  Robyn Hode as protest literature set against the encroachment of government centralization on the political autonomy of the North of England. Robin Hood’s theft and murder of government officials ironically informs the outlaw’s own expressed love for the king, calling to mind the relationships between the crown and the northern magnates, such as the Percy earls of Northumberland, in the later Middle Ages. In one striking scene from the Gest, King Edward and Robin Hood ride out of the forest together, dressed in Robin’s livery of Lincoln green. This juxtaposition of the king of England with the king of outlaws implies the complexities with which the poem contemplates law and sovereignty, complexities attendant to the remarkable development of sovereign theory from the early-thirteenth century in western Europe. Foregrounding the exceptional powers of the sovereign that would inform the political theory resonate in the later work of Bodin and Hobbes, the Gest laments the dwindling regional autonomy of the North, with its once-great barons, and the increasing pull of law and authority to London and Westminster.