This chapter examines the way two related genres, science fiction (SF) and the weird, deploy horror to critique the sources and expressions of “American horror” – namely, the dark side of American exceptionalism and the social and environmental consequences of its imperialist projects. The two genres share similar generic genealogies, but they diverge teleologically. SF is built on the assumptions of scientific rationalism and therefore follows an identifiable internal logic, relying on our implicit or explicit belief in the plausibility of the story. The weird, by contrast, is resolutely committed to the inexplicable. Both, however, use horror to disrupt our reliance on realist modes of representation that flatter our epistemological certainties. As such, both SF and the weird have been platforms for colonialist and nationalist imaginations, but both have also been potent vehicles for revealing, resisting, and repairing the brutalities of such imaginations.

Is all horror “body horror”? Can we think of the horror genre without thinking about the body’s messy and intimate materiality? This chapter looks at some of the queasier manifestations of horror culture, a mode that foregrounds questions of the body’s (and the reader’s or viewer’s) limits. Despite body horror’s association with recent cinema, this chapter argues for a longer and more diverse lineage for the term, an attention to embodied experience and its grotesque transformations that can be found in US fiction from Charles Brockden Brown’s spontaneous combustions in Wieland (1798) through to the zombie apocalypse novels of the twenty-first century. The emphasis is placed on five main types of body horror and their differences: hybrid corporeality, parasitism, abjection and disgust, the grotesque, and, finally, body horror built around gore and the explicit rendering of violence.

Architecture is a university subject with educational roots in both the technical university and art/specialized architecture schools, yet it lacks a strong research orientation and is focused on professional expertise. This chapter explores the particular role of research within architectural education in general by discussing two different cases for the implementation of undergraduate research in architecture: during the late 1990s and early 2000s at the University of Sheffield, UK, and during the 2010s at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. These examples illustrate the asynchronous beginnings of similar developments, and also contextualize differences in disciplinary habitus and pedagogical approaches between Sheffield, where research impulses stemmed from within the Architectural Humanities, and Aachen with its strong tradition as a technical university.

How can we judiciously tell the many continuous, discontinuous, overlapping, persistent, and simultaneous, tales that constitute German history? Taking as an example James J. Sheehan’s engagement with the question: “what is German history?”, the introduction argues that the conceit inherent in the question is the belief that a unitary history must exist, even when the decades of scholarship Sheehan inspired indicated that it does not. In actuality, German history can only ever be regarded as an aggregate of Germans’ histories, and it is critical that we begin by recognizing that a great many of the people who lived those histories did so without regarding difference and unity as antinomies or hybridities as problems. Adopting that position has a number of advantages. It not only allows us to better understand the actions of the great variety of people who thought of themselves and were regarded by others as German during the modern era, it also helps us to gain a better understanding of the roles Germans and German things have played in the history of the modern world.

Phan le Ha ’s childhood in Hanoi, Vietnam, brought her in contact with words, expressions and songs in Russian, French, Chinese and English in turn:  languages that were designated as the enemy's language, "alongside her mother tongue Vietnamese." In a duet with Bao Dat, they venture into a reflection on the hybridity and intertextuality of memories and languages rejecting colonial categorizations anchored in discourses of self and others.

This article places Margaret Cavendish's most famous fictional "prose of a certain length," The Blazing World, in the welter of available genres from which she fashioned the fantastic hybrid attached to her 1666 Observations on Experimental Philosophy. In a time when the normative medium for imaginary narrative was verse, she hybridized her text further by writing in prose and attaching it to a work of natural philosophy. This article's chief effort is to reveal the hybridity of the work's satiric pastiche, with its calculated dazzle and challenge to its original readership's "real," and its responsibility in the history of literature in English for the emergence of the novel, not so much and but as science fiction. The work takes a major step toward the constitutive conflict of the modern novel between "inside" and "outside" experience, appearance, action. Its fantasia of the protagonist's cohabitation with her friend inside the body of her husband delights with a gender fluidity or boundary breakdown like that of its own form, followed by a spectacle of sublime female military power and violence on another world.

In the Danube Gorges region of the Balkans, one finds a forager stronghold with continuous evidence of occupation throughout the Mesolithic (at least since 9500 cal BC). Based on the cultural characteristics and repertoire of documented practices, it seems that these foragers were in one way or the other communicating with or being aware of communities inhabiting regions hundreds and even thousands of kilometers away. In the course of the regional Late Mesolithic (ca. 7400–6200 cal BC), there are some indications that the Danube Gorges communities might have emulated/shared certain cultural practices that are characteristic of Neolithic communities in western Anatolia and farther to the east. One could perhaps go so far as to see this region as part of the same “culture area” with other regions of the eastern Mediterranean. Yet, in many other elements of daily life and ideology, these communities remained firmly rooted in older traditions characteristic of Mesolithic communities in the rest of Europe. There is now ample evidence that the foragers of the Danube Gorges came into contact with increasingly mobile Neolithic groups in the last centuries of the 7th millennium BC, which triggered a substantial culture change. This chapter examines the consequences of these contacts and exchanges, and the subsequent, relatively brief, flourishing of a hybrid cultural world.

International commercial courts are ‘international’ in that they perform functions that may be characterized as international. First, all ICommCs of the three categories presented in the chapter are domestic courts for international commercial disputes, or international business, more broadly defined. Second, they allow the internationalization of domestic legal orders by helping a jurisdiction attract foreign capital, and become a global and regional dispute resolution hub. ICommCs’ functional internationalism spills over into their organizational and procedural design. While ICommCs may be seen as hybrid institutions – between the national and the international, the public and the private, the formal and the informal – the chapter brings to light the new institutional mechanisms of interoperability between them and other dispute resolution fora – domestic courts, international commercial arbitration and international courts and tribunals. The functional interoperability will eventually determine the durability of ICommCs.

This chapter looks at the current relationship between international commercial courts (ICommCs) and international commercial arbitration (ICA). It first covers the historical background and current drivers for international dispute resolution. It finds ICommCs are of complex identity whose utility will be tested by market choice. The chapter then discusses what is meant by autonomy in the present context, and continues by looking at the needs and requirements of international dispute resolution (‘imperatives’) from a number of perspectives: those of the consumer (the ‘business imperative’), of governments (the ‘political imperative’) and of non-arbitral decision-makers (the ‘jurisprudential imperative’). From that review, a measure of interdependence between ICA and ICommCs emerges. The chapter ends with the conclusion that ICA and ICommCs will enjoy a competitive and collaborative, but not hybrid, relationship.

In this chapter, we explore the concept of purity and the processes of purification in their archaeological as well as broader national expressions. The discussion touches on aesthetic and religious conceptions of a pure, sacralized past, on the removal of living people from archaeological landscapes, and on the modernist separation of past from present, science from culture, and of the rational from the affective.

This chapter traces the rise of consumer goods in Europe and its colonies between 1650 and 1800. Women and men consumed ever larger quantities of clothing, personal accessories, household furnishings, and colonial products. However, any claim that the growth of consumption was “revolutionary” must confront two powerful objections: (1) that there were strict social limits to the spread of new types of consumption; and (2) that the growth of consumption was less sudden than it appears, having roots in the urban life and court society of preceding centuries. Taking these objections seriously, the chapter argues that consumption grew most intensively among nobles, gentry, professionals, skilled artisans, and better-off farmers. Many peasants, unskilled laborers, migrants, and enslaved people were excluded from participating in the consumer boom. Consumption was also gendered, with women leading the way in the acquisition of clothing. In the Americas, where indigenous Americans, European-descended settlers, African-descended slaves, and free people of color interacted, heterogeneous forms of consumption proliferated. The hybridity of sartorial culture reflected degrees of agency and self-fashioning among different socioracialized groups. The growth of towns and the advent of royal courts had encouraged new forms of consumption before 1650, but Europe experienced a more thoroughgoing social transformation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The volume of goods increased, their variety widened, and their social reach deepened.

This chapter traces the rise of consumer goods in Europe and its colonies between 1650 and 1800. Women and men consumed ever larger quantities of clothing, personal accessories, household furnishings, and colonial products. However, any claim that the growth of consumption was “revolutionary” must confront two powerful objections: (1) that there were strict social limits to the spread of new types of consumption; and (2) that the growth of consumption was less sudden than it appears, having roots in the urban life and court society of preceding centuries. Taking these objections seriously, the chapter argues that consumption grew most intensively among nobles, gentry, professionals, skilled artisans, and better-off farmers. Many peasants, unskilled laborers, migrants, and enslaved people were excluded from participating in the consumer boom. Consumption was also gendered, with women leading the way in the acquisition of clothing. In the Americas, where indigenous Americans, European-descended settlers, African-descended slaves, and free people of color interacted, heterogeneous forms of consumption proliferated. The hybridity of sartorial culture reflected degrees of agency and self-fashioning among different socioracialized groups. The growth of towns and the advent of royal courts had encouraged new forms of consumption before 1650, but Europe experienced a more thoroughgoing social transformation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The volume of goods increased, their variety widened, and their social reach deepened.

This chapter starts off by discussing the roots of historical anthropology in ‘people’s history’ before the linguistic turn. It then traces the journey from the history workshop movements of the 1960s and 1970s to historical anthropology, focusing on European and Indian groups (the Subaltern Studies Group). It highlights the work of Ann Laura Stoler as an example of how historical anthropology led to new and exciting perspectives in historical writing with deep implications for the deconstruction of historical identities. Historical anthropologists brought with them a concern for the everyday, diversity, performance and resistance and they raised an awareness of the undeterminedness of the past. They also emphasised how collective identities were rooted in constructions of culture. Relating cultural values to practices, diverse theories of the everday examined different structures of power and the agency of ordinary people in resisting and re-appropriating these structures of power. Treating culture as fluid, plural and changing, it also contributed to the de-essentialisation of human identities. Emphasising mimetic processes and the interrelationship of diverse mimetically produced images, historical anthropology also contributed to the decentring of Western perspectives.

H. Patrick Glenn defined common law as dynamic and in relation to other laws. This chapter argues that, looking beyond rules, substance, and structure, towards legal tradition and legal culture, what becomes obvious is the interrelationships between legal systems. Constant contact between legal traditions results in the birth of mixed legal systems, dual systems, hybrids or composites, and legal pluralisms. First, it acknowledges the merits of the functional approach in certain contexts, but also points out the limitations of this approach when faced with dissimilar factual circumstances. Next, it argues that comparative lawyers must use the new approaches added to the methodologies of comparative law, including deep-level comparative research, critical comparative research, sociolegal methodology, and global comparative law. Indeed, “Deep-level comparative law” can reveal irreconcilable differences between legal systems. Finally, Turkey is taken as an example where the law cannot be defined as a mixed jurisdiction in the classical sense. Instead, its hybridity created by its unique historical and socio-cultural context reveals it as mixed in two different senses. The task of teasing out this type of culture, with divided identities, multidimensional, and a composite or hybrid, will not fall to comparatists alone but require help from anthropologists and sociologists.

Taking on a contemporary topic of pervasive importance, Francesco Sinatora examines in detail linguistic heterogeneity and identity construction as they impact Arabic Facebook and YouTube discourse. Key issues of identity, positioning, performance, and multimodality are embedded in Arabic speakers’ use of discourse strategies that convey meaning in multiple ways and on multiple levels. ‘Social media’, states Sinatora, ‘provides a platform for the emergence of more hybrid practices, including the mixing of the vernaculars with MSA, as well as the localization of multilingual forms and global pop culture references.’ Sinatora reviews concepts of intertextuality and indexicality as they pertain to the use of language both written and spoken in Arabic-based social media. He connects these concepts to the idea of ‘vernacular globalization’, which refers to the linguistic construction of identities through diverse and multimodal formulation of powerful and appealing text messages. The second part of his paper documents how dissent is expressed through close examination of postings on Facebook and on YouTube. Through both written and spoken text analysis and face-to-face interviews with authors, Sinatora takes steps toward creating a new methodology for analysing variation in Arabic.

This chapter discusses some grammatical features of 'African urban youth languages', focusing on Camfranglais in Cameroonian cities such as Yaoundé and Douala. While anti-languages have been characterised as parasitic styles of speaking that graft onto the grammar of another language, developing an ephemeral emblematic lexicon but little or no grammatical structures of their own, Camfranglais stands out in that its grammatical features cannot be entirely reduced to a (Standard) French matrix. Rather, it presents various phonological, morphological and syntactical properties mostly transferred from Cameroonian Pidgin English and its Bantoid substrate languages, most probably via a spectrum of varieties of Cameroonian French. However, as long as the distribution of these features along the continuum Camfranglais–Cameroonian Pidgin English–second-language varieties of French (and English) remains unclear, it cannot be decided whether Camfranglais has indeed developed a hybrid grammar peculiar to itself. On the functional level, Camfranglais retains some typical anti-language characteristics with a tendency to expand as a style of speaking that indexes positive values such as integration, solidarity, progressiveness and a cosmopolitan Cameroonian identity.

This chapter first examines a variety of approaches, including that of Frantz Fanon, to exploring violence and race in a colonial context. Rejecting binary approaches, like that of Fanon, this examines the political use and cultural understanding of the concepts like "race" and "ethnicity." Rather than see race in terms of a simple imperial deployment of racist practices and beliefs against the colonized, this chapter also argues for an "appropriation" model of ideas and practices of race and ethnicity to help explain the complexity of race-talk and race practices involving France, the Vietnamese, the Khmer, Africans, and Chinese. The chapter looks at France’s initial concern with white prestige in choosing the soldiers to fight on the side of France before turning to the Vietnamese. It examines pre-existing Vietnamese understandings of race, as articulated in Vietnamese, and their combination with Western discourses of race and racial hierarchies. The chapter digs into particularly troubling texts on race, racial extinction, and cannibalism, and the implication of such texts for understanding the war as a whole. Looks at arguments over purity, hybridity, and race.

This chapter argues that the geographical heterodoxy of Pacific surrealism might be understood as a correlative to surrealism’s transgressive impulse, extending logics of inversion across oceanic space. It discusses how irregular forms of mapping were commensurate with surrealism’s aesthetics of defamiliarization. More specifically, the chapter discusses representations of Pacific iconography in visual artists (Man Ray, Brassaï), visits to Pacific regions by European surrealists (Paul Eluard, Jacques Viol) and the role played by surrealism in theorizations of ethnography (Claude Lévi-Strauss). It also analyzes the ways in which Pacific space was understood by theorists of surrealism such as Bernard Smith and James Clifford, while addressing the complicated political situation of surrealism in mid-twentieth-century Japan. The chapter subsequently tracks more recent manifestations of surrealism in Pacific writers and artists such as Aloï Piloko, Shane Cotton, Len Lye and Alexis Wright, commenting on connections with cultures of indigeneity and ways in which these artists integrate styles of hybridity.

Huang and Mendoza’s introduction to the fourth volume of Asian American Literatures in Transition offers a refresher on Lisa Lowe’s formative critical work, Immigrant Acts (1996), published at the beginning of the time period covered in this volume. The authors reframe Lowe’s terms “heterogeneity,” “hybridity,” and “multiplicity” within several watershed moments affecting Asian Americans and other groups in the USA: including the Defense of Marriage Act (1996), the September 11 attacks, the decriminalization of sodomy (2003), the COVID pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement. While many of these events exacerbated the vulnerability and precarity of some Asian American groups, the turbulence of the time fueled the Asian American literary imagination as writers in this period drew on more representational strategies for their literary experimentations than in previous periods. This volume covers precisely these tensions: artistic proliferations in the face of injustice, recognition in the face of social erasures, innovation in the face of neoliberal white supremacy’s monopoly on wealth and violence.

Like an interface, foreign relations law addresses multiple and diverse questions about how the ‘domestic’ relates to the ‘international’ sphere. This introductory chapter unfolds the idea of bridges and boundaries between foreign relations law and public international law and develops the guiding questions of the volume. It also reflects on missed encounters between the two fields and introduces the core concepts and the approach of the book. Finally, it exposes the overall structure of the book and summarizes the contents of individual chapters.