The thinking of place is a crucial preoccupation in Heidegger’s late thinking, especially sustained by an ongoing frequentation of poetry and its posture towards language. The question of Ort is illuminated in Heidegger’s discussion of Georg Trakl, notably in two essays: “Die Sprache,” presented in a first lecture version on October 7, 1950; and “Die Sprache im Gedicht: Eine Erörterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht,” first presented on October 4, 1952 under the title “Georg Trakl: Eine Erörterung seines Gedichtes” and published the following year with the same title (Merkur 61, 226–258). In this study I trace a few moments of Heidegger’s meditation on place in these two texts. Issues ranging from estrangement to belonging, from rhythm to the quiet unity preceding all difference, from body to politics, from pain and evil to their transfiguration, are encountered along these paths.

The political theorist and intellectual historian Istvan Hont argued that the term ‘commercial society’ was used by Adam Smith in ways that were distinct from any of his peers. Smith, Hont claims, ‘stretched’ the term in order to ‘make it a theoretical object for moral and political inquiry’. This chapter engages with this argument using computational methods for interrogating datasets of varying sizes.

The first, a custom-produced ‘Adam Smith’ corpus, is compared with a ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ corpus, both of which have been extracted from the larger Eighteenth Century Collections Online dataset. For the second of these datasets, a list of publishers’ names has been collated, from existing scholarly enquiries by Richard B. Sher and Andrew Hook, to construct a dataset that enables one to inspect and interrogate what might be thought of as the distinctively Scottish history of ideas in the period within which Smith wrote his seminal works.

The comparative method allows us to test Hont’s assertion that Smith deployed the concept of ‘commercial society’ idiosyncratically by charting the extent to which the features of Smith’s thinking were adopted by his contemporaries, firstly within the Scottish context, and secondly within anglophone culture of the period as represented by Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

This article excavates the Philippine nation’s cosmopolitan and transnational Asian intellectual moorings, in order to reconnect Philippine history to that of Southeast Asia, from which it has been historiographically separated. It argues that turn-of-the-twentieth-century Philippine Asianism was crucial to the concept of the Filipino nation that the ilustrados (educated elite) constructed, to the ilustrado-led Propaganda Movement’s political argumentation against Spain, and to the political mobilization and organizing of the Katipunan and the First Philippine Republic. It incorporates the “periphery” into our understanding of Pan-Asianism to correct our exclusively intellectual historical and Northeast-Asia-centric understandings of Pan-Asianism. It shows that the revolutionary First Philippine Republic’s foreign collaboration represents the first instance of fellow Pan-Asianists lending material aid toward anticolonial revolution against a Western power (rather than overthrow of a domestic dynasty) and harnessing transnational Pan-Asian networks of support, activism, and association toward doing so.

This chapter traces the turn in diasporic thought, particularly in the settler nations of Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States, toward engagement with the settler colonial histories of dispossession that were a condition of possibility for our arrivals here. It develops brief close readings of literary texts by Black, Asian diasporic, and Indigenous writers as a way to show how the entanglement of Indigenous and diasporic struggles for justice and transformation might be inhabited and mobilized. At stake, this chapter argues, is the possibility of imagining other worlds than the modernities that were born in the conjunction of Indigenous dispossession and racial slavery, worlds shaped by better, more sustaining (and sustainable) practices for relating with human and nonhuman others, including the land itself.

This chapter explore the dynamic relationship between two distinct forms of representing urban space. These more or less follow the path of the subject or that of the object, as the more subjective itinerary (i.e., an image of space that emerges from the individual subject’s perception or experience of places) necessarily elides much of what the abstract, apparently objective map (a “God’s-eye view” or “view from nowhere” that established as non-subjective overview) can reveal. Finding one’s way through urban spaces involves something more like an itinerary than a map, the latter involving some sort of supra-subjective perspective, and yet both forms are essential to the experience of metropolitan space. In situating oneself in a given place, and in moving from place to place, one traces out an itinerary that may be more or less useful, but one also must have some more abstract sense of the overall spatial array of which that itinerary is merely one part. Cognitive mapping, in this sense, combines the two at all times. I argue that every literary cartography—every work of creative writing, in fact—of the city must also put into play both modes to create a more dynamic mapping project.

In Chapter 5, I turn to ritualised practices of relatedness, specifically the weddings of those in London, approaching them as transnational household rituals, which contribute to the reproduction and reconfiguration of families across space. In examining migrant weddings as moments in individual and familial life cycles, I consider how these rituals offer opportunities for negotiating relations within a discourse of ‘tradition’. Moreover, I suggest that the emotionally and morally significant community of belonging, which weddings help to constitute, further mediate kinship relations. At the same time, the chapter considers non-normative weddings (registry ceremonies) and intimate relationships (come-we-stay’, or cohabiting, relationships), as well as singledom, exploring their impact on the making of persons and relations. Together, they reveal how marital and parental status shape expectations and practices of relatedness across space and moral economies of transnational kinship more generally.

This chapter focuses on the spatial element in the Linguistic Landscape (LL). The public space is understood in terms of a twofold spatial metaphor, in which the LL can be contained by the public space, but in which the language display of the LL in fact creates the public space. The argument that the term landscape has long-standing links to denotations of social activity and organisation directly supports an understanding of the LL not as ‘a view of the land’, but as human activity that is engaged with the built and natural environment. The chapter thus proposes a model of spatial indexicality, in which units of the LL point not only to the space which they occupy, but to nearby spaces to which they refer, and potentially to other spaces which are far removed or which may be imaginary. Within this model, examples are analysed which illustrate the regulation of spatial divisions by signage, spatial and material properties of sign units, the use of metaphor to establish authenticity and to stake cultural claims, and references to imaginary spaces. The counter-balancing potential for units in the LL to express messages which are not anchored in spatial reference is also examined.

The short story remains at heart of southern literature. Anthologies, surveys, and criticism all tout the centrality of the form to the representation of the region. But the short story form does not merely facilitate a focus on diverse, local southern cultures. Because short stories can be easily republished and collected, these “little postage stamps” also allow such diverse, local cultures to circulate broadly. In examining the ways short fictional forms enable access to and communication with far-flung places, this chapter offers case studies of three accomplished short story writers: Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Oscar Cásares. Theirs is a literature of the provinces that is far from provincial – a regional literature par excellence that remains very much engaged with the broader world.

Chapter 3 takes a closer look at place-specific restrictions on public protest. It examines the rules that apply under the First Amendment’s “public forum” and “time, place, and manner” doctrines. These doctrines are the foundation for enforcement of public order laws, the zoning of protest, and the targeting of specific protest locations including healthcare facilities, abortion clinics, funerals, and residences. The chapter critically analyzes the basis for and scope of spatial restrictions on public protest and dissent.

Chapter 2 lays out the managerial system that applies to protest in the U.S. It uses a protest typology to describe the scope and limits of protesters’ rights under the First Amendment. The chapter identifies the public forum and time, place, manner, and other restrictions that limit protest activity. It addresses protest permits, policing tactics, enforcement of public order laws, limits on press activity at protests, and other elements of the “managed dissent” system. The chapter sets the stage for the book’s argument that public protest is over-managed in ways that make protest more costly, less safe, and less effective.

The Shakespeare North Playhouse comprises a re-creation of Whitehall’s sixteenth and seventeenth century Cockpit in Court, enfolded in a modern building and performance garden housing community and educational activities. This chapter outlines the overall aims and the educational philosophy of the Shakespeare North project during its long phase of development (2004–21), as it worked towards the Playhouse’s realisation in 2022.

The chapter begins with a description of, and a meditation on, the implications of Shakespeare North’s location in the Liverpool City Region borough of Knowsley, a particularly deprived area of England. Summarising the historical background to Shakespeare North’s commemoration of the early modern performance culture of Knowsley, it suggests that viewing theatre history from the perspective of the regional might provide a fresh perspective on configurations of region, metropolis and nation both historically and in a modern context. From this, the chapter argues that connectivity and the dialogic might be central to all of Shakespeare North’s activities, especially the educational.

Following deliberation on enablements and difficulties involved in creating the playhouse as a heritage-based, urban-regeneration initiative through the interactions of diverse partnership organisations, the chapter finally suggests how the dialogic might inform Shakespeare North’s community education activities and experiments.

This chapter provides an introduction to poet and composer Ivor Gurney’s responses to war, predominantly in poetry, but also in his music. It explores the strategies used by Gurney in the face of war; his sense of fate; his use of, and response to, place; his representation of the ordinary soldier; and his responses to the conflict through the lens of writings by Walt Whitman and Leo Tolstoi.

The boundaries between space and place remain unsettled in the founding imagination in three ways: as a space that is unbounded since there is nowhere that cannot potentially be converted into a place; as a space that is already an inhabited place; and as a place that is continually infused with new groups, thus potentially altering the familiarity of that place. This chapter explores the fate of the Samnites in the Roman imagination and the Native Americans in the American imagination as the wild Stranger who threatens place. The Samnite and the Native American are different from the corrosive Stranger, yet both play a part in the construction of its identity. The Greeks, Italians, and Gauls remained a flourishing aspect of Roman culture even as they were cast as Strangers to make room for Rome’s ownership of its past, just as the European and immigrant were cast similarly in the United States. But the Samnites and Native Americans were frozen in time, simultaneously rendered invisible and retained as an image of not just the conquest of wildness but the unifying and securing of a familiar space.

This introductory chapter examines the study of lynching through the lens of material culture with particular attention to landscapes of memory. It both introduces the narrative of the lynching of Tom Johnson and Joe Kizer in Concord, North Carolina in 1898 and uses interdiscplinary theories drawn from African American studies, American studies, cultural history, and cultural geography to advance new methodologies for the study of racial violence.

This chapter considers the work of a series of twentieth-century Welsh composers, including Daniel Jones, Grace Williams, William Mathias, Alun Hoddinott, Karl Jenkins and Rhian Samuel. It draws on their compositions and their writings about music to interrogate the question of whether musical qualities or characteristics that might be identified as distinctively Welsh can be discerned in their output. It explores the influence of Welsh landscapes, history and concepts, such as the notion of hiraeth (longing), on the ways in which they have drawn on or sought to reflect their homeland in their compositions. It reveals that while many of these composers were uneasy about identifying a distinctively Welsh school of composition, some level of engagement with their nationality or sense of Welshness was a common trait, albeit manifested in different ways. Several common themes emerge, including the importance of a sense of place and ideas about the past.

Ancient Greek philosophy has often been dismissed as irrelevant to contemporary environmental thought or part of the problem in environmental terms because of its apparent dualism and anthropocentrism; Plato is often seen as emblematic of this philosophical stance. Following the research of Timothy Mahoney, this chapter calls into question this characterisation of Plato’s philosophy. Additionally, it examines the environmental perspectives of several philosophers within the later Platonic tradition, whose philosophy was closely connected with ancient Mediterranean religions and has been largely marginalised and excluded from the canon of western philosophy. This chapter argues that there is an important strand in ancient philosophy which is participatory, relational and ecocentric, depicting the philosopher as rooted in place and landscape, and necessitating the philosopher’s recognition of the interconnectedness and sacredness of the natural world and the kinship and ensouled nature of all beings and natural entities. As such, this chapter suggests that ecocentric environmental perspectives can be discerned within Platonism (especially within late antique theurgy) and that, consequently, this strand of ancient philosophy has a great deal to offer to environmental ethics and contemporary environmental thinking on nature and the natural world.