August Wilson had one of the most impressive debuts in the history of theater in America, an area whose highest echelons had previously been dominated, overwhelmingly, by white playwrights. The four plays Wilson brought to Broadway between 1984 and 1990, however, not only changed the scope of American drama but also the shape of its audience, drawing Black theatergoers to Broadway in numbers significant enough to impact Broadway’s sense of its audience and of the infinite possibilities of live theater. These 1980s productions thus not only set the parameters of Wilson’s ten-play cycle – one play set in each decade of the twentieth century – as it explores the tension in African American history between community expectation and heroic disappointment, but, within those parameters, also enabled Wilson to create on the American mainstage some portion of the history that might have been visible in a world where American history is always already Black.

Across his career, as the previous work of this chapter’s author and that of other critics such as Andrzej Duszenko, M. Keith Booker, David Ben-Merre, Jeffrey Drouin, and Ruben Borg has shown, James Joyce frequently included reflections on a changing landscape of time in response to Einstein’s ‘new physics’. However, while there has been important recent research touching on this topic, including the author’s wider survey of work in modernist studies, no critic has yet fully centred the watch as a technological index of Joyce’s attitudes to time. In this essay, three specific examples of Joyce’s concern with watch technology are looked at, located in the relationship of timepiece and character; firstly, Bertha’s wristwatch in Joyce’s play Exiles (1918), followed by Bloom’s pocket watch in Ulysses (1922) and, finally, HCE’s timepiece in Finnegans Wake. Each of these watches evidence Joyce’s complex feelings about connections between embodiment, sexuality, and technology.

Few concepts have become as closely associated with war literature as trauma. War literature revolves around the isolated voices of soldiers and their deeply unsettled afterlives – it takes as its subject matter the individual experience and consequences of war. This chapter argues, however, that the mass may be more than incidental in our understanding of how war literature embodies trauma. An overwhelming experience, trauma is deeply entangled with mass warfare, industrialisation, and the homogenous, empty time of global capitalism. The question of mass or scale is central to how we have come to conceptualise trauma more generally, whether in relation to genocide, pandemics, ecological limits to growth, or the political consequences of global finance or even mass trauma itself. Understood as a structural condition of anxiety, trauma is now even encroaching upon the future as a pre-traumatic foreboding of militarism and the threat of global catastrophe. Examining these links between war and the mass, this chapter suggests a reconceptualization of trauma that associates its characteristic temporal dislocations with questions of scale, uniformity, and incomprehension.

Time reversal symmetry violation in the eletroweak interactions provides evidence for an asymmetry of time itself, given the Representation View.

This chapter explores some philosophical quandaries facing the natural law outlook, with particular emphasis on the prospects for a natural law account of human rights. The chapter begins by considering challenges to natural law’s reliance on the notion of human nature. It then examines the role of time in natural law theories, focusing on the question of whether natural law changes. Next, the chapter looks at the place of rights in the natural law tradition, critically discussing the suggestion that the notion of rights is at odds with the core themes of the natural law outlook, before considering what natural law has to offer to human rights theory. Finally, I turn to the place of God within natural law theories, raising the issue of whether natural law assumes a theistic worldview. I argue throughout the chapter that a hermeneutic and historicised view of natural law, which sees it as shaped by and discovered through human social practices, holds important advantages in responding to each of these challenges.

The climate emergency is strengthening the understanding that humans, non-humans and the planet are intrinsically interconnected. International law has both participated in the creation of the paradigm that has led to these entangled socio-ecological problems and has proven to be inadequate for their remediation. This article argues that, through the multiple enclosure of natures, knowledges and times, international law imposes a vision of the world that is incompatible with the conception and functioning of the interconnected web of life. In light of this, we suggest that the political notion of commoning could offer useful intellectual opportunities for engagement with and a radical rethinking of international law as an element of ecological systems. By not treating natures, times and knowledges as objects of law, commoning opens an intellectual and confrontational space to rethink the premises, processes and aims of international law.

This chapter examines a series of teapots, produced in the 1760s, whose material and decorative contradictions prompted questions about scale, knowledge, and mortality. By examining these different registers, the chapter reveals the diverse roles these diminutive and densely patterned teapots played in the cultural and social life of eighteenth-century Britain. The designs featured on these teapots sought to represent rock formations and fossils. In a culture increasingly interested in the emerging discipline of geology and the history of the earth, such designs prompted important conversations. At the same time, the materiality of these wares, which was both highly breakable and durable, allowed for questions about material knowledge. The material qualities also asked about the nature of human lives and mortality. Ceramics could be bequeathed over generations and broken in an instant. Finally, the function of these pots and their role in tea drinking, meant that these objects were constantly handled and made animate. The form of these wares was unusual, however, and their discordant features highlighted the “otherness” of objects. In exploring the different decorative, material, and functional aspects of these pots, the chapter shows how relatively small things were particularly adept at asking big questions.

This chapter examines the temporality around which international law is articulated, with an emphasis on the doctrine of international responsibility. The chapter specifically elaborates on how the doctrine of international responsibility suspends international law’s one-directional temporality and provides discursive devices that allow one to travel back and forth between the past of wrongfulness and the present of responsibility. Such two-directional temporality, the chapter argues, is at the service of the narrative function of international responsibility in that such two-way time travel allows a re-representation of the real produced by legal claims made under the doctrine of international responsibility. The chapter ends with concluding remarks on the distinction between the imaginary and the real.

This chapter guides the reader through three related enigmas of modern physics. The first is a mystery of quantum mechanics. Important aspects of quantum mechanics are still not truly understood, although competing theories have been proposed, including the Many-Worlds approach. The second enigma is the emergence of spacetime, and especially the way it interacts with gravity. Rather than following the traditional methodology of ‘quantising’ classical theories, the author proposes an alternative approach and instead seeks gravity within quantum mechanics. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the mystery of the arrow of time: what distinguishes the past from the future. Together, these three mysteries of modern physics serve as an important reminder of the endurance of enigmas in the very foundations of scholarly fields. Re-examining founding principles can provide a constructive alternative means of investigating mysteries, not only in modern science but also across other disciplines.

This chapter develops an analytically functional concept of EV and begins to identify its sources, pathways, and outlets into the global ecosystem and everyday life. The chapter then expands on the core concepts of Earth Systems theory, complex adaptive systems and human niche construction to address topics such as vulnerability and violence, especially cultural, structural, and direct violence. The next step will be to build and parse a heuristic model that conveys the range of the concept’s applications and traces EV’s production, pathways, mediators, and outlets, as well as its facilitators and effects throughout its cycling. Next, the chapter examines previously developed and related concepts of ecologically associated violence. The purpose of this is not to take issue with them, but rather to synthesize and build upon previous iterations. The chapter closes with a brief discussion of the nuances and politics of EV. These ideas will be developed further in Chapter 6. Nevertheless, a brief presentation is useful here because it helps to understand how EV has become normalized and ingrained in the everyday life of the contemporary human niche.

Beginning with “multidisciplinary approaches to the study of self,” the chapter explores the “collective experience” of Africa through poetry. The chapter, in its depiction of the interwoven relationship between self and narrative, establishes the perpetuity of self with words such as “ever-changing,” “evolving,” “becoming,” and “actualization.” Further, the chapter establishes how self is discovered through a consciousness of belonging to a larger society vis-à-vis self’s relationship with other aspects of the society. Poetry gives the reader the opportunity to feel a larger expression of the narrative, such as the energies, events, and experiences felt by the poet. However, understanding these expressions requires the possession of the same level of sensitivity by the reader. With references to his poetic collection, the author proceeds to examine the narration of self to portray existing socio-cultural values/desires and their importance in Africa. They include eulogizing and celebrating individuals, extolling the mother both as the carrier and nurturer of life, and the pride in face marks as ethnic identity, amongst others.

This chapter explores cultural themes in Africa with “narrative politics” and its cultural values central to the discourse. In expounding “narrative,” the chapter brings to the fore its two most potent modes (literature and history), which reflect reality but are different in their modus operandi – through imagination (creativity) and verifiable facts. Written beautifully and with references, this chapter blurs the contrast between the two “narrative devices” and focuses instead on espousing their working togetherness. This is because a co-adoption of both in the narrative adds creativity to facts presentation, which thus makes it interesting to read and sustain readers’ interest just as their Yoruba derivative, Alo and Itan, is often a mixture of both.

The chapter also asserts the importance of autoethnography and how through personal experience and identity, the society’s “collective consciousness” is exhibited and manifested. Also, there are references made to the cultural relevance and implication of “time and season,” “taboos and superstitions,” “greetings and reverence,” as well as “namings and places” in Yorubaland.