A wall is a sonic medium. It gathers, reflects, amplifies (or sometimes attenuates), and otherwise processes sound; it thereby creates strata of sensory memory and history. Rethinking the notion of teichoscopy (the use of walls to enhance vision), I propose an analogous concept of teichoacoustics in the Greek and Roman worlds – using walls as a technical means of sounding and hearing; that is, transmitting and receiving auditory sensation. I focus on four cities and their walls: Babylon in the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe (via Ovid, Shakespeare, and the Beatles); Troy during the Trojan War, especially Helen’s visit to the city walls in Iliad 3; Thebes, from the creation of its walls through music to its depiction in tragedy; and finally Delphi and the musical inscriptions on the external walls of buildings there. While the particular media functions of sound vary at each of these different sets of walls, these examples demonstrate a number of productive relations between sound and walls, and suggest possibilities for a practice of listening to architecture – both figuratively and literally – as a way of excavating cultural memory in and about antiquity.

This introductory chapter focuses on theoretical issues related to the imagining subject, discussing its subjectification processes and varied uses of mediating technologies to constitute new social imaginaries.

Chapter 7 shows how diaspora activists’ interventions in the Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni Arab Spring were shaped by the relative degree of geopolitical support for the cause from their host-country governments and influential third parties, including states bordering the home-country, international institutions, and the media.

This chapter provides some concrete suggestions for how democracies should proceed in the so-called post-liberal era. The future of prodemocratic international law will depend on democracies leveraging collateral areas of international law to advance liberalism. This involves an essentially defensive liberalism.

Histories of dissolving high/low culture divides inform Katalin Orbán’s discussion of contemporary graphic fiction, as she posits the critical and popular emergence of long-form, verbal-visual works that push narrative conventions in new directions, such as spatial-temporal experiments (e.g., by Chris Ware and Richard McGuire), the use of visual metaphors and other conventionally linguistic literary devices, and genre blurring distinctive to the drawn medium.

Studs Terkel was a pivotal figure in the popularization of oral history as a literary genre and he is a key point of reference in today’s cultural radio and podcasting worlds. He was also one of the central synthesizers and champions of Chicago literature, drawing deep inspiration from earlier writers and advocating for subsequent generations. This chapter explores how Terkel crafted a variety of inventive “literary lives”: 1) Urban Literary Mythmaker, 2) Eclectic Disc Jockey, 3) Coach for Chicago’s Literary Scene, 4) Co-founder of a Peoples’ Oral History, 5) Soapbox Poet, 6) Global Literary Ambassador, 7) Sidewalk Professor, 8) Memory Palace Archivist, and 9) Humanist Trickster. Key biographic events in Terkel’s life and his links with other key Chicago writers are explored.

At a time when political observers worry – justifiably – about the health of the US’ national political institutions, threats to local democratic governance cannot be ignored. The local news media – by providing accurate information to citizens about what is happening in city halls, county governments, school boards, and other local political institutions throughout the country – constitute a vital link in the democratic process. Political representation and government effectiveness thus depend on reinvigorating the local news media and the citizen engagement that goes along with it. It can be done, but without a collective effort by citizens, journalists, and groups committed to strengthening local journalism, the long-term health of American democracy may be in peril.

What was the relationship between a revolutionary African state and the postcolonial media? This chapter analyses the evolution of the press in Dar es Salaam after independence. By the mid-1970s, Tanzania had just two national daily newspapers, one of which was owned by the party, the other by the state. But this was not the outcome of a teleological slide from an independent to a muzzled media, as liberal Cold War-era conceptions of the ‘freedom of the press’ would have it. This chapter shows how the press became a contested site of socialist politics in Dar es Salaam’s internationalised media world. Stakeholders debated questions of who should own newspapers, who should work for them, and what they should write in them. Even when the government nationalised the country’s only independent English-language newspaper, it placed it under the control of a radical, foreign editor and emphasised the need for it to serve as a critical voice. However, when this editorial independence transgressed Tanzania’s foreign policy, the state moved to bring the press under closer control, justified by Third World trends towards ‘development media’.

The demise of the newspaper industry in the last two decades has exacerbated the problems of limited public engagement in local politics. The downward slide of local government coverage has left the nation less knowledgeable about its local elected officials and less likely to participate in local elections. These trends are concerning enough as they have already played out. But they are particularly worrisome given local journalism’s precarious future. Without a revitalization of the local media environment, democratic accountability and quality representation in cities and towns across the United States will become increasingly elusive.

This essay considers modernist internationalism and formal mutation in light of the globalized media ecology brought about by imperialism’s capitalist monopoly of the world-system. Since imperialism and colonialism constituted the first ever properly global system of control and circulation, modernism’s global imaginary and technical innovations cannot be understood outside of a world economic and technological frame. Building on scholarly narratives of modernism’s global vision and its metropolitan incorporation of the colonial periphery/“other,” this article shows how new media technology allowed for the rounding of the world and the advent of new literary forms such as the montage. Media discussed include cinema, photography, magazines, and the phonograph, while poets considered include but are not limited to Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Blaise Cendrars.

The American avant-garde theatre of the post-World War II era, with its underlying engagement with the betterment of society and a foregrounding of the body, either solo or collective, could be seen as an extension of the Romantic project. But by the 1990s, the ideas and impulses that fueled its artistic drive seemed to dissipate as it became subsumed by Postmodernism and also by popular culture. The avant-garde energies and impulses did not disappear, however, and increasingly they could be found in the theatre’s eager adoption and exploration of new technologies and digital media. By mediatizing live performance, the new technologies often became co-equal with, or dominant over, the human actors. Beginning with groups and individual artists such as Squat, The Wooster Group, and Laurie Anderson and continuing through The Builders Association, Big Art Group, and Annie Dorsen, among many others, a post-avant-garde has emerged that does not fetishize technology, but rather embraces it as a tool to alter consciousness—much as the historical avant-garde did—and to expand the possibilities and definitions of performance.

Mailer remained skeptical of many forms of technology; he felt technology to be the enemy of critical thinking, growth, and magic. As this chapter acknowledges, his wariness of various technologies informed works such as Of a Fire on the Moon, in which Mailer eerily predicts some of the very criticisms that have become magnified since the advent of the Internet, fearing that “digital computer was not a machine which would force men to think in new ways about the environment” but was instead “plastic brainpower” that might accelerate “the rush to extermination.”