This chapter considers the historical development of how Greenlanders acquired political participation in their own affairs. As of 2021, most political parties in Greenland see independence as the ultimate goal. The Self-Government Act of 2009 grants the inhabitants of Greenland the right to this independence.1 My argument here is that a historical view reveals that independence can be seen as the logical next step from the current self-government. This has been attained through continual negotiations between Greenlanders and Danes since the middle of the nineteenth century, and through decolonization and independence processes as seen elsewhere in the world.

Throughout his life, Martin Buber insisted that his dialogical thinking was “not the result of reading but of personal experience.” This emphasis on his own generative experience does not vitiate the fact that, as Buber likewise acknowledged, “in all ages it has undoubtedly been glimpsed that the reciprocal essential relationship between two beings signifies a primal opportunity of being, and one, in fact, that enters into the phenomenon that the human being exists.” Although historical antecedents pointed toward Buber’s dialogical thinking, its crystallization occurred during the tumultuous years of the First World War, when he underwent a conversion, personal as well as intellectual, from the mysticism of his prewar writings to his signature postwar dialogical thinking.

At the outbreak of the war, Ernst Cassirer enjoyed an international reputation as a leading figure in the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism. Still a Privatdozent after years at the University of Berlin and repeatedly thwarted from obtaining a chair of philosophy in Germany due to entrenched anti-Semitism, Cassirer’s erudite publications had garnered widespread recognition. Rudolf Eucken, recipient of the Nobel Prize and “a famous man,” as Cassirer writes to this wife, Toni, in 1911 even asked him out to lunch when invited to speak at the University of Jena. Numerous professors and “a huge crowd of other people” were in attendance. His works were on display in bookshop windows along with the announcement of his lecture in the spiritual capital of Weimar Classicism.

This chapter explores the multiple intertextual reference points that Salman Rushdie deploys in his work. While giving a sense of the range of influences in his work, an analysis of Rushdie’s use of intertextuality gives further insights into Rushdie’s artistic process but also the wider context of his own reading and cultural emersion in popular culture. Perhaps best captured in the idea of the ‘sea of stories’, Rushdie’s version of intertextuality finds links to his notions of hybridity encapsulated in both his characters and the production of his texts. This enables him to produce a wide network of transnational cultural reference points and to connect with multiple audience constituencies through a careful process of modulation of these. The chapter also explores the wider discursive notion of intertextuality as pioneered by poststructuralist theorists such as Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, in turn extending the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, which enables a contextualized analysis of the numerous vocalities located in his texts, exposing ideological power structures that Rushdie’s novels subvert and disrupt.

The Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro offers a brief overview of Ishiguro’s remarkable oeuvre. The Introduction touches on the key themes and concerns of Ishiguro’s work as well as on the deceptively innovative formal narrative and linguistic qualities of his works; it offers a brief survey of the author’s career by following the successive ‘turning points’ that he adduces in his 2017 Nobel Lecture; and it considers the ways in which, in focusing so often on the ethics of professionalism, the novels also reflect on the profession of authorship itself – a role that Ishiguro has both embodied and performed with such adroitness and style, and with such admirable literary inventiveness and integrity, for more than forty years.

After briefly surveying what is known of Thucydides’ life and work, this introductory chapter outlines some of the key themes in Thucydidean scholarship, which will also be important in this volume: the nature of the History (including its language, style and organization), its reception by both historians and theorists and the key methodological questions and strategies that have been applied to the text.

This chapter provides the first overview of the gobierno petition-writing process. It focuses on how subjects would create and structure these documents, devoting particular attention to the contributions of many intermediary figures: formal and informal assistants, translators, and procurators, as well as notaries and others. It frames petitioning as a paper ritual emulating the vassal–ruler encounter in which the subject’s voluntad flows to the heart and mind of the monarch, and asks how these lifeless papers could come – through a scaffolded series of legal fictions – to contain this volition. Specifically, vassals might reach to the fictions of notarial truth and signatures to seal this will to manuscripts. The result was that a wide range of subjects, even illiterate ones, might partake in the petition-and-response system. Moreover, the social backgrounds of these intermediaries could be quite diverse, meaning that before these texts even reached the court this dialogue was already touched by many actants.

I ask how sensory models are established and operate across different cultures, including their variant ethnographical nuances. This problematises the interplay of the senses whereby sensory conjunctions or amalgams form part of everyday life and ritual practices in many societies, as opposed to the broader compartmentalisation of the senses in Western aesthetics. The chapter compares a range of categories that delineate different senses, as well as the varying modalities per sense. This is accomplished through an investigation of linguistic descriptors of senses as a starting point. How a particular culture names the senses that wield cultural importance is however not merely an exercise in description or enumeration. I analyse sensory nomenclatures in a three-fold manner to unveil the phenomenological epistemology of the senses. First, I engage with the numbers of modalities per sense in order to acknowledge alternate sensory models beyond the hegemonic Romano–Grecian five-sense categorisation. Second, I query the social significance of the nuances of each sense. Third, I raise examples of how two or more senses may be employed synaesthetically. By focusing on cultural interpretations of sensory practices, pairings, and intersections, this approach sheds analytical attention upon everyday orderings of sensory categories and their cultural significance.

This chapter discusses responses to Thucydides’ History in the thousand-year period between the foundation of Constantinople in 330 CE and the appearance of the first translations of Thucydides in the late 14th century. The chapter describes the processes by which the text was preserved and transmitted and how it was read and understood in this period. It also explores the question of why the Byzantines were interested in Thucydides and the creative ways in which some Byzantine authors adapted or redeployed Thucydides’ work in their own writing.

This chapter reflects on the challenges of translating Thucydides into English. The discussion, which is informed by the author’s own experience of producing a translation of the History, offers some general observations on the translation process, but it focuses on the specific problems raised by Thucydides’ text. Issues considered include genre (including the question of the work’s title), structure and, above all, the stylistic complexity of the work: the compression of Thucydides’ language and the range of different voices in the text. The problem of cultural distance, and how (and to what extent) this can or should be reflected in translation, is also addressed.

This chapter examines the identity construction and related stigmatization within the framing contest of desmovilizados (deserters) versus reincorporados (loyalists). While this contest is primarily amongst groups of ex-combatants themselves, the government also plays a role not only by encouraging desertion, but also by contesting both sides, grouping all ex-combatants under the same criminal label, and discrediting any frame constructed by combatants and/or ex-combatants. While this contest is much less structured and the frames emerged more organically – particularly as the deserters do not have a clear leadership constructing a strategic frame for them, nor a clearly defined audience – it was still having a powerful influence on reintegration experiences. In this last contest, which overlaps with all the others, language and labelling are key, as these components both create stigma and help ex-combatants fight against it.

The most fundamental measure of the global eclipse of Britishness is to be found in the politics of language. The narrowing semantic range of imperial Britishness was epitomized by India’s request for admission into the post-war Commonwealth in 1947 as the first member to adopt a Republican constitution. Resolving this dilemma also raised the question of whether the Commonwealth should retains its customary ‘British’ adjectvie, pressing the ‘British Commonwealth’ to the limit of its capacity to bind an increasingly atomized membership. By the early 1960s, the UK Government itself was inclined to repatriate the meaning of Britishness in official usage to refer only to themselves - itself a major landmark in downsizing the idea of Britain. This chapter traces the protracted diplomatic wrangling over the British name itself in the post-war world, with profound consequences for its future viability.

Across the globe radio developed rapidly as a popular and transformative technology in the aftermath of the Great War. In the 1920s it quickly became a means of mass communication reaching millions, enabling listeners access to news, information, and entertainment. In Ireland the advent of ‘wireless’ broadcasting coincided with independence and the partition of the island. Initially, broadcasting in Ireland looked inward as it sought to help define and consolidate the deeply conservative states that emerged from the violence of the Irish Revolution. However, identities throughout the island of Ireland have evolved to challenge the narrow, defensive, insular states that struggled to assert themselves a century ago. This chapter addresses the evolution of broadcasting in Ireland and how Irish writers have successfully used radio and television to find regional, national, and global audiences. Although presented in an Irish context, much of their writing transcends national borders because it explores the human condition in a variety of dramatic and comedic forms.

New technologies inevitably require new terminology. To refer to rudders, spectacles, telephones, and more, over the centuries Irish speakers borrowed words from other languages as well as repurposing native terms. In recent times, the challenge posed by loanwords has been political as much as linguistic, but, while we cannot know how people of the Middle Ages felt about the inflow of words from Norse or Norman French, technological vocabulary probably tells the history of contact between the Irish and other cultures more clearly than any other word-field. Within Irish itself, terms for inventions and innovations serve as fascinating case studies in language change and resilience: some medieval words for still-common devices have inexplicably fallen out of use; some early terms have been recorded again after long periods of silence; some words have manifested twice, hundreds of years apart. This chapter charts the emergence and development of a selection of technological terms in both medieval and modern Irish.

If learners are required to better their consecutive learning, their engagement and their motivation, they must be informed about the procedures that lead to certain grades of their individual oral and written performance. First of all, they have to understand that grading does not only depend on their respective teacher, but that he or she has to follow the often-detailed requirements of the school authorities. Furthermore, they have to be informed about the reasons why the grading of written performance is considered as more important by the authorities