In the previous chapter, I briefly illustrated the changes in citizenship and development models institutionalised by Latin American governments from the early twentieth century up to the present day. These transformations have shaped the very identities of social actors, and their modes of interaction with the state and between themselves. How have patterns of collective self-identification changed over time and how have scholars made sense of these processes? In this chapter, I focus on changes in collective identities through a critical assessment of the narratives used to describe the alternations between class and ethnicity as referents for social organisation. Indeed, as Yashar (2005) has famously demonstrated in the Latin American context, different kinds of citizenship regimes diffuse and then activate different identity cleavages. A review of the abundant literature on rural movements in Latin America clearly shows how scholarly production has been greatly influenced by intellectual fashions and political ideologies, often in a cyclical way. As a result, the same aspects of reality have been glorified in certain periods and neglected in others, and most narratives of social change have oscillated between either dichotomous or homogenising interpretations of collective identities. Here, I consciously try to remedy this imbalance as I analyse the political roles, forms of organisation and social relevance of both indigenous and peasant movements since the 1950s.

Leo Tolstoy wrote throughout his career about Russian peasants, first at a class-inflected distance but later with admiration for their clothing, labor, and religious and moral feelings. As a Count, he automatically held a particular position vis-à-vis peasants, especially before the 1861 emancipation. His literary works and teaching tales depict peasants variously, sometimes idealizing an individual (from Platon Karataev in War and Peace to Alyosha the Pot), other times looking with distrust or frustration at peasant groups and their stubborn opposition to farming innovations. Eventually, Tolstoy famously adopted peasant garb, practiced many kinds of peasant crafts and labor, and enthusiastically communicated with peasant and sectarian thinkers, admiring their simple Christian faith. His primers for peasant children and collections of teaching tales often picked up folktales, paring their style down to the extreme simplicity that he considered typical and preferable. Toward the end of his life Tolstoy sought out the opinions and experiences of Russian peasant laborers in works of passionately engaged journalism. Major figures in Russian revolutionary movements (Lenin, Plekhanov) admired his insights, letting his authority in depicting peasant life continue into the Soviet period.

This chapter situates Lev Tolstoy’s life and work in relation to the social and political context of the estates (meaning, soslovie) system in imperial Russia. Although the Russian nobility was a social estate distinguished by a high degree of heterogeneity when it came to such matters as scope of property (including income and debt), modes of sociability, access to power, relationship to the provinces, and connection to the cultural and political centers (e.g., Moscow, St. Petersburg), the nobility remained a corporate body of subject-citizens united through a necessarily uneven but reciprocal relationship with the autocratic state, a relationship that was articulated as a set of privileges and obligations. In addition to offering a brief historical survey of the noble estate in Russia, this chapter explores a selection of moments in Tolstoy’s life and career in relation to the meanings that accrued to noble status as a demographic designation, a political experience, and a social performance. At times, I turn (briefly) to Tolstoy’s major works of fiction (notably, War and Peace and Anna Karenina) to illustrate how the period’s definitions of nobility found expression in the novelist’s artistic imagination.

This concluding chapter brings together the arguments of the four chapters in order to assess broader changes and continuities in Roman musical culture during the period under consideration in the book. While the ideological frameworks underpinning musical discourses remained largely constant over time, and competing political actors continued to use music for their own ends, it is notable that the gradual evolution of Roman society and politics prompted new types of engagement with music. This has important ramifications for our understanding of Rome’s relationship with Greek culture, as well as the interactions between elites and non-elites.

Wallace wrote about masculinity throughout his career, from The Broom of the System’s (1987) parodies of neurotic macho posturing to The Pale King’s (2011) encomiums to white-collar workers. It is peculiar, then, that critical attention to Wallace’s treatment of masculinity is still spotty. Part of the reason for this, perhaps, is that Wallace’s gender politics were rather conservative, and therefore anathema to scholarly communities rightly committed to challenging traditional ideas of masculinity. However, there is more nuance, complication and ambiguity in Wallace’s depictions of masculinity than is normally acknowledged, even if his works do remain broadly masculinist in their tenor, and given to portraying a kind of “masculinity in crisis.” This chapter examines these points of interest and dissonance by drawing particular attention to the following overlapping themes: sport and the body, fatherhood, and class, offering grounds from which scholars can investigate this topic in greater detail. Similarly, although Wallace’s texts generally resist being recruited into a progressive gender politics, I argue that their depictions of masculinity are nevertheless worth considering. By paying attention to masculinity in his work, we can further explicate Wallace’s aesthetic innovations, better historicize his relation to patriarchy, and – as the case may be – reaffirm the need to criticize what he has to say about men.

This chapter considers Wallace’s use of individual language and narrative as a means for self-creation, from the heavily be-nicknamed LaVache in Broom, who molds his vocabulary to evade communication with his family, to the impersonal marketing argots of commercial focus groups, by way of the community-forming ritual recitations of AA. The chapter highlights Wallace’s extraordinarily prolific (though not uniformly successful) mimesis of vernacular, noting some of the more interesting failures of his career in this respect, including “Solomon Silverfish” and sections of Infinite Jest. This chapter elucidates the operation of language, both monologic and dialogic, as key to Wallace’s aesthetic project and as a central weapon in his ethical strategy for overcoming solipsism, involving sincerity, cooperation and absolute faith in the other.

Previous studies of Lebanese Salafism have neglected the analysis of the local adaptation of global Salafism to the Lebanese context. This chapter seeks to fill that gap by exploring how Salafism found a foothold in Tripoli in the 1990s and how local repertoires and identities were instrumental in popularizing Salafism among the local poor. Northern Lebanon and Tripoli constituted as the primary cradle of Lebanese Salafism; the Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon constituted as a further Salafi hotspot.

Lebanese Salafi in the Tripoli discourse had distinct characteristics. More pragmatic and more business-oriented than Salafism in other Arab countries, it depended on financial patronage from the Gulf. The Lebanese Salafis’ lack of religious autonomy created an opening for jihadi underground organizations. Although Salafi ideology is important in explaining why males joined jihadi groups in Tripoli, social factors often played an even more decisive role. This chapter explores how jihadi groups could readily gain a foothold in poor quarters, taking advantage of the prevailing informality and making these hiding places for outlaws and armed groups.

We all share a common interest in preserving the well-being of our planet. But the changing climate does not affect us in the same ways, at the same pace, or to the same degree. This is because of where we live, but also due to our respective levels of wealth and income, our physical and mental disabilities, the colour of our skin. We can’t address climate change without contending with issues of difference and inequality. It’s precisely because those least responsible for climate change will suffer its most severe impacts – within cities and regions and across the globe – that an approach which takes account of that imbalance is essential. Applying an equality lens to climate litigation is not just the right thing to do; it’s also more effective. By underscoring the ways in which climate change is a reflection of unjust power relations, a focus on equality makes it more likely that policy will attend to climate change’s causes and help ensure that the most culpable bear the greatest costs of redress. While some cases should advance the universal rights of everyone to a sustainable climate, litigation through an equality lens offers distinctive political, strategic, and jurisprudential advantages.

Chapter 3 examines the Permanent Inter-Allied Committee for the War Disabled (PIC), which, from 1917 to 1922, hosted annual conferences, created an institute on the Rue du Bac in Paris for the study and cataloguing of pertinent information, and published the Inter-Allied Review to circulate the results of their efforts. PIC members and affiliates – many of whom were prolific contributors to the Allied culture of rehabilitation – shared a common vocabulary for, and framing of, the work of rehabilitation. They also, by and large, shared an understanding of their role within it, in terms that preserved the social hierarchy through preservation of their masculinity vis-à-vis the working-class soldier. The cooperative space created by the PIC, where government and military officials, social reformers, and medical practitioners came together, encouraged the reimagination of belonging, but whether the soldier and his sacrifice belonged to the nation, the Allies, or to humanity – and therefore whether nations ought to maintain exclusive responsibility for the disabled soldier – was never fully resolved.

Chapter 4 examines the manufacture and provision of artificial limbs reveals, demonstrating that the maintenance of masculine bodies as national bodies, in the strictest sense, was of paramount concern during the war. While wartime flows of technical knowledge ultimately meant that prosthetic limbs throughout the Allied nations became largely indistinguishable, government authorities who oversaw production were determined to see men refitted with goods that were in essence ‘national’, in their actual construction and in their materials. Technological processes could be transnational composites but the bodies that they managed could not. Wartime prosthetic devices embodied the values of the Allied culture of rehabilitation, manifesting the remaking of the working-class body according to middle-class values. New devices allowed men to perform according to the pre-war masculine ideal and to carry out the demands of labour, but the promises of science to return men to their pre-war forms fell short and veterans participated in various modes of self-fashioning and advocacy to achieve satisfactory solutions on their own terms.

Chapter 2 investigates the development of a transnational Allied culture of rehabilitation that underwrote local and national efforts to rehabilitate the war disabled. Military and government officials, social reformers, philanthropists, and medical authorities contributed, throughout the war, to a robust, multi-directional campaign that championed the virtues of rehabilitation and solicited support for programmes that aimed to fit the war disabled into post-war society. Such literature became, itself, a way to imagine the contours of the post-war world with respect to hierarchies of gender and class and the roles of religion, science, rights, and internationalism. The co-constructed nature of the wartime culture of rehabilitation, in which images and rhetoric were frequently borrowed and re-circulated amongst nations, served to harmonise – though not entirely homogenise – Allied visions for rehabilitation and for social rights and welfare, more broadly.

In James’s late tales, he offers a critique of his own procedures, raising to an absurd pitch one of his most characteristic structures of feeling: the determining power of an absent cause, as his characters contemplate something that is not only hidden from view but is constitutively unavailable for direct representation. This structure, I argue, is fundamentally about the veiled social relations of the all-dominating money culture James found in The American Scene. James’s work thus takes shape against the background of an economic world that is less represented than it is formalized as the very structure from which it seeks autonomy. If the “Beast in the Jungle” and The Sacred Fount offer the most negative version of this autonomy – works that fail to engage the world around them – The Golden Bowl tells a different story, consistently gesturing towards a series of determining social contexts it nevertheless withholds from the reader’s view. In this way, James shows us how the fine discriminations in which he is invested rest on a set of real-world determinations that his characters are constitutively unable to see.

This chapter focuses on how patronage politics interacts with the politics of identity, notably ethnicity, religion, gender, and class, across Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The chapter highlights rich variety of forms of patronage politics across these categories, co-existing with underlying similarity in function. Politicians cater to a wide range of social identities and target varied identity groups with patronage, showing immense creativity when doing so. But the underlying goal of such politicians across our highly diverse, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious contexts is fundamentally the same: to capture more votes using offers or promises of patronage. This instrumental process generally reinforces rather than erodes existing social identities (except, the chapter points out, those based on class, which clientelist politics tends to undermine by connecting lower-class recipients of patronage to higher-status dispensers of it). Even so, particularly where electoral systems encourage broadly inclusive strategies, patronage distribution regularly crosses identity-group boundaries and thus tends to bridge divides rather than promoting deeper within-group bonding.