Loanwords are divided into cultural borrowings and core borrowings, then categorised into semantic fields to allow typological comparisons. Fewer borrowings come from Roman political and military power (i.e. fall into semantic fields connected to law, government, and the army) than was previously thought. An analysis by parts of speech shows that nouns predominate but adjectives and verbs were also borrowed. Two loanwords related to identity, ‘Roman’ and ‘Christian’, are given more detailed consideration in the context of the imperial and late antique world.

In the Conclusion, Forming Afro-Chinese Worlds, I deepen my discussion of aesthetics by focusing explicitly on the literary forms that writers use to imagine Afro-Chinese worlds. I make one last conceptual intervention by theorizing alluvial form (how a narrative texturizes the matrix of space and time through water and sediment, reconfiguring “worldliness”) with Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019). This novel approaches the topic of Africa–China relations by fictionalizing the real-life story of a Kenyan woman found to have Chinese DNA. Through short, proleptic bursts that mimic waves rolling into shore, the novel reanimates the Indian Ocean as the primary site of exchange between the Swahili coast and southern China. The text counters the dehumanizing discourse surrounding Africa–China relations, using literary form anchored in the sociocultural histories of East Africa and so representing China in and on its own terms. I end by considering the fractal form of history, or the underlying process of creolization that I have teased out of how each chapter conceptualizes the alluvial.

In July 2020, while most of the world was in lockdown amid the global Covid pandemic, a documentary aired on television in France called “The Hidden Children of Colonial France.” It featured recent interviews with elderly men and women from the Ivory Coast, who claimed the right to French nationality on the grounds that they were métis and their biological fathers had hailed from metropolitan France.1 They had all been born before 1960, when the Ivory Coast was a colony of France, and at the time of the documentary they were members of the Association of the Foyer of Métis in the city of Bingerville, located just outside of the capitol of Abidjan.

Sumarizes the content of the book. Explains sources, methodologies, and key terms. Elaborates arguments and frames the conversation with scholarly works on race and Africa, race in Africa, and colonialism.

Chapter 4 will move away from speaking about broad generalizations and focus in on some of the ways intersecting identities affect the experience of various workers. For instance, how does race, religion, class, sexual orientation, and age affect the experiences of workers navigating the structural norms of the workplace? The chapter will also explore the intersection between the two groups of employees this book is primarily focused on—workers who have both a disability and caregiving responsibilities. Most often, these workers are mothers with disabilities.

Katherine Spear Smith had no need to work for her living but, growing up in a liberal, academic household in the early twentieth century, she felt a need to find a vocation in life. Influenced by Wordsworth and Ruskin, she constructed a persona based on sensitivity and responsiveness to nature and sought to express this by becoming a painter. Art, however, proved fraught with anxiety and disappointment and she fell back on her identification with nature, shot through with religious promptings. The functions of ruralism in helping Spear Smith construct an identity, but also the potentially isolating and even illusory character of this identity in her case, are the principal themes of this chapter.

Diaries are rich but sometimes challenging sources for historians, not least because of their particularity, which can make it difficult to generalize from them. This chapter outlines some of the ways scholars have approached diaries, highlighting the comparative method used by historians such as James Hinton. The relationship between, in Fothergill’s words, ‘the first-person narrator who speaks in the diary and the historical personage who held the pen’ is considered and Huff’s view that we should read diaries as ‘friendly explorers’ endorsed. Questions relating to when, why and for whom a diary may have been written are discussed and the equally important issue of what a diary omits or suppresses. The exceptional potential of long-run, unpublished diaries as source material (as used here) is underlined. Finally this chapter explains the principles on which the diaries on which the book is based were selected and the extent to which they may or may not be representative.

The power of place to stir memory was well-known in antiquity, and is exemplified by a speech Cicero places in the mouth of Piso in de Finibus (On Ends). Piso reflects on the Athenian cityscape, and remarks on the capacity of places and the memory associated with them to stir emotion even more strongly than hearing or reading.1 Accordingly, the role of monuments and buildings in Republican memory has been the focus of a good deal of recent scholarship.2 Nor was the mnemonic potential of buildings lost on the princeps himself: as recent work by Eric Orlin and others has shown, architecture played an important role in the Augustan regime, shaping memories of recent events, and stimulating remembrance of a more distant past.3 Examples include the temple of Apollo on the Palatine and the new constructions on the Capitoline (treated elsewhere in this volume), as well as the Forum Augustum, with its statues of Republican notables (the summi viri) evoking a particular model of Roman history.

The chapter ’Meow and More’ lead us to the sociolinguistic concepts of code, code-switching, bilingualism, and multilingualism. It describes transnational communication, polylanguaging, translanguaging, and networked multilingualism by using cat-related examples, going over the technological aspects of computer-mediated communication to show how technology affects multilingual online discourse. The chapter also illustrates how we use language to construct our identity in the cat-related digital spaces.

The chapter ’Cattitude and Purrception’ goes once more into the set-up of the research surveys and sets them in the context of sociolinguistic attitude and perception studies. The two surveys were designed to find out the reasons why people participate in cat-related digital spaces and what they think about the linguistic variations they encounter there. The interest of this chapter lies in how the answers of the respondents are analysed, categorised, and interpreted. Switching from the human identity to the cat identity online brings with it a switch in language variety, with the purrieties working as a recognisable indicator for identity.

The transformation of the film industry was tightly bound up with the plan of the Chinese Communist Party for creating the new nation and its socialist culture and the “revolutionization” of film stars was an essential part of it. This chapter focuses on the story of one individual, the actress Li Ming, who started out as a military arts soldier in the New Fourth Army, to illustrate the everyday politics at the Shanghai Film Studio in the 1950s. Li Ming suffered an identity crisis as both actress and party cadre, witnessed the complicated relationship between the new nation and film stars, and experienced the impact of the “organization” on her new individual career. From a perspective of “the party’s own,” her story provides us with an intriguing way to understand the revolutionary cultural agenda, examine the degree to which the power of the Party permeated the grassroots, and comprehend the everyday politics in the socialist transformation of the urban culture.

The chapter provides an overview of the burgeoning historiography of the People’s Republic of China, especially of the early period between 1949 and 1978, and suggests how we might integrate this new work into narratives of the Chinese past and present. In working through the research of the past thirty years the findings not only help us identify new areas of research, bur also rephrase some of the initial questions. The chapter highlights areas in which reconsidering PRC history seems especially necessary: transnational flows, violence and social transformation.

This chapter brings together two seemingly separate aspects of Hainan Island’s history during the Chinese Communist revolution and into the early People’s Republic. These two aspects are the anti-localism political campaigns of the 1950s through which local leadership was punished or removed for favoring local priorities over national ones, and the relatively high revolutionary participation by women in the Communist fighting forces of Hainan. This chapter uses recent Chinese and Western scholarship, as well as memoir and oral history, to examine how traditional gender roles were reinforced through the anti-localism campaigns, even during what were otherwise some of the most radical moments of the early PRC. The popular revolutionary drama Red Detachment of Women took several forms, including ballet and opera, and as a cultural artifact it stood in for the history of women fighters on Hainan from its first performances in the early 1960s. Like the anti-localism campaigns, Red Detachment of Women, as a didactic drama, reinforced patriarchal and mainland control over Hainan, and this chapter aims to illuminate some of the ways in which this happened.