In Australia, the educator landscape continues to be dominated by persons who are non-Indigenous, middle-class, speakers of English as their primary language and of European/Anglo cultural heritage (Daniels-Mayes 2016; Perso & Hayward 2015). When working with culturally minoritised learners, educators currently find themselves operating amid educational imperatives that are often complex and contradictory (Unsworth 2013). As foregrounded in chapters 3–5, cultural responsivity is a pedagogical approach that seeks to value, recognise and utilise the intelligence and cultural capacities that students already possess in the classroom (Morrison et al., 2019). This is a practice that requires educators to go beyond the limitations of simply being culturally aware, having cultural understanding or being culturally competent and instead seeks to tailor an educator’s practice according to learners’ unique place-based linguistic and cultural repertoires. In doing so, the eductor acknowledges through their practice that First Nations contexts are not all the same and that learners will often speak a range of differing home languages.

I conclude with a review of my findings in Chapters 3–7. I elucidate the relationship between “oil” and “Islam” and what that relationship teaches us about politics in Gulf monarchies. The overwhelming message is that with their abundant wealth, Gulf rulers have been exploiting not only oil rents but also religious doctrine and its (re-)formulations to function as tools of social management and social control. Their aim is to bolster their authoritarian ambitions: ruling families’ capacity to both dominate and shape their societies and retain their monopoly over resources. For the sake of maintaining – and enriching – dynastic states and constructing the nation, oil and Islam are their principal tools.

A gap divides modern ideas of genius from the sentimental conceptions of the 1760s and 1770s. Though talent was a common feature, musical genius for Rousseau and Diderot was integrally related to expression, affective identification with a community, and an orientation towards ‘the people’. Also important was ‘enthusiasm’, originally a type of religious inspiration fostered after 1700 within radical Protestant groups such as Count Zinzendorf’s Moravians, who radically challenged contemporary ideas of masculinity, sexuality and religious faith. Enthusiasm’s secularization with Goethe and Herder initiated the countercultural ‘period of genius’ (Genieperiode) later known as the Sturm und Drang. Its composers, such as J. M. Kraus, Neefe and Reichardt, lavished attention on popular, commercial forms such as German comic opera and ‘popular song’ (Volkslied) – priorities only challenged when the movement’s opponents such as J. N. Forkel tactically redefined ‘genius’ to centre it on technical mastery rather than inspiration and expression.

This chapter shows that the entire intelligible world in Plotinus has a personal nature. Every real being is a person, not an abstract concept or a dead thing. Moreover, those real beings don’t exist in separation, and they are not autonomous individuals, but form a unified, living whole, an organism or, as Plotinus calls it, a city with a soul. The Forms are sacred statues of the gods, which can be seen through their sensible images. In the end, Plotinus coins a neologism to describe this peculiar vision of reality: παμπρόσοωπόν τι, “being-all-faces”. This grand vision gives a deeper meaning to all the earlier metaphors of statues, reflected images, and faces that I have been elucidating in the book. In a deep unity of the intelligible world, to know and love one’s own face or to know and love the face of another is to contemplate all the other faces that participate in the living city that is reality.

I introduce the topic, theme, central argument of the study, and its setting in Gulf petro-monarchies. I discuss the relevant scholarly literature, especially as it concerns ways in which religion (and specifically, Islam) has been used by political actors to advance particular interests. I provide a detailed elaboration of the argument and its various parts, as well as the method of analysis and justification for the choice of cases. I then discuss the context and cases in greater detail, with attention to key features of the historical development of the petro-monarchies from their pre-oil contact with the British imperial power, the arrival of oil companies, the importation of labor, the definition of borders and emergence of “modern” states. I illustrate noteworthy structural peculiarities of each of the four states. Finally, I outline the architecture of the manuscript, with an overview of each chapter.

This chapter examines René Depestre’s epic poem Un arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien. It contextualizes Vodou as a cultural and spiritual lieu de mémoire that was a major turning point leading to the Haitian Revolution. It analyzes the monumental role that the Vodou religion played in creating a sense of collective identity and consciousness that would eventually lead to the Ceremony of Bois Caïman. I argue that Vodou was at the heart of the resistance movement and provided agency for the enslaved. This agency allowed them to question the colonized Christian white god and embrace their own African spirituality. In so doing the enslaved were able to come together to create community and affirm their identity/ies. I then argue that the five sections of the poem depict Vodou as a framework for denouncing racism in the US South, as various lwas travel to Alabama, where lynching was commonplace, to decry the US’s political and religious hypocrisy and to avenge the enslaved and their families in the face of the wickedness and hatred associated with slavery. Depestre decries the hypocrisy of the white god and suggests to readers that the lwas show true humanity.

Though it is derived from individual thriving, community thriving cannot be reduced to the aggregate of individual experiences. Rather, community thriving is defined as the function of a community’s sustainability and its effectiveness at producing well-being outcomes. An overview of community concepts related to thriving, thus defined, is offered, and the implications of well-being, fairness, and worthiness in a community context are detailed. The chapter concludes with specific historical illustrations and steps readers can take to enhance the thriving of their own communities.

This chapter provides an overview of folk and multicultural festivals in Australia, especially as to how these events have been important to the creation and celebration of community identity since the 1950s. It begins with a brief outline and critique of the policies that have shaped modern Australia as a culturally diverse nation and the role of festivals as a vehicle for representing ethnic identity, inclusivity and tolerance. This discussion also considers the contentious positioning of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures as part of a broader notion of diversity, as well as debates raised by a focus on the performance of ethnic identity that emphasises authentic practice and devalues cross-cultural collaboration. This is followed by a discussion of the origins of an Australian folk culture in British folk music traditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the revivalist folk movement of the 1960s. The final section outlines the development of national folk festivals as events representing an authentic Australian folklore and culture that, like multicultural festivals, offer insight into the problematic relationships between place, community, belonging and the national space.

The role of women in the religious sphere of the military world has been underserved. This chapter turns to the epigraphic record to illuminate the role of women in military households and communities in both public and private contexts. Visual and epigraphic material is a rich source of information for our understanding of women’s roles in public military settings and private military households, and especially how women expressed religiosity on behalf of themselves, their soldier-husbands, and their households broadly. The evidence is not overwhelming, but there is enough to start building an image of the religious aspects of the lives of women associated with the army. With this aim in mind, this chapter illuminates the lives of women in military communities through the lens of religion as one aspect of daily life. By investigating precisely what women were doing in the military community, this contribution addresses the increasing trend to see the families of soldiers – whether living in the fort or extramural settlement – as a direct part of the military community, rather than a “civilian” counterpart that has often been discussed in pejorative terms or as an appendage population that is located there only by chance.

The topic of women in Roman military communities (i.e., military women) did not suddenly appear in the late twentieth century. One could say its emergence is the result of the novel idea that women were present in most aspects of life in the ancient world. Women have been around the military much longer than the general or professional reader might realize. As a topic, military women have not generally been a group to which anyone paid sustained attention until the last decades of the twentieth century. The topic gained interest as social and cultural history became welcome components of historians’ toolboxes and as archaeological fieldwork has yielded new evidence and innovative methodologies have led to updated analyses of old artifacts. This chapter reviews the historiography of the debate over the long duration of Roman studies. In particular, the authors focus on how research into these military women and their families has slowly diversified and grown over the last three decades. The field is strong and growing to provide a more complete understanding of the Roman military.

While most accounts see worshippers of Saturn as indigenous Africans or rural peasants, this chapter argues that stele-dedicants used stelae to articulate positions for themselves within the frameworks of the wider empire. Unlike earlier stelae, which worked to imagine stele-dedicants as a horizontal community of equals, stelae dedicated from the first century BCE onward became billboards that asserted the prestige of dedicants in the deeply localized but also vertically structured world of the Roman Empire. This can be seen in the adoption of new anthropocentric iconographies that adapt a koine of imagery, the composition of stelae, and new titles for worshippers like sacerdos that are borrowed from a civic sphere.

With the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the hitherto slow transition of Japan’s animation industry from the Tokyo-centric traditional production methods using paper-based materials to a fully digital network that connects individuals over vast distances has accelerated. This coincides with an unprecedented uptick in the establishment of new animation production studios in the regional areas of Japan, and with incentives in the form of public subsidies for “regional revitalization” projects designed to mitigate the effects of depopulation, theoretically creating a mutually beneficial situation for all parties involved. This chapter introduces various examples of regional studios and analyzes their differences in approach, in particular with regard to the involvement with the local community. It illuminates their main function and position, be it serving as a contract-based independent entity, a subsidiary of a Tokyo-based company, or a studio developing in-house projects to subcontract work out for, thus earning license revenue.

Dictionaries are an ancient and ubiquitous genre, flourishing wherever and whenever humans flourish, but it’s important to remember that dictionaries aren’t products of human biology or necessity; they are products of human creativity and community: dictionaries are cultural and therefore political.  This chapter explores what it means to understand that simple fact. Dictionaries are partisan systems of ordering words and meanings.  They may aim to be universal, but they inevitably emerge from, record, and respond to social moments from particular perspectives.  Those perspectives may seek to celebrate or denigrate certain cultural groups, legitimate or suppress certain languages, facilitate social mobility or discrimination.  Dictionaries may highlight their cultural positionality as such for political or commercial profit, or they may cast their subjective styles as objective and universal for the same political or commercial profit.  In all events, dictionaries end up documenting cultural information in their definitions, usage labels and notes, illustrative examples and quotations, inserts and appendices, and beyond.  And, again in all events, dictionaries can have cultural impacts entirely unintended or unanticipated by their makers, running from the positive and life affirming to the dehumanizing and antisocial.

This essay offers a speculative account of a third wave of Beckett criticism, emerging at the turn of the current century, one which is dedicated to the articulation of a Beckettian literary politics.

The first two waves of Beckett criticism, the essay suggests, despite their manifest differences, shared a sense that Beckett was in some fundamental sense an apolitical writer. The first wave sees his work as invested in a universal condition, which is resistant to any form of political particularity. The second tended to see his writing as a deconstructive endeavour, one which reveals not an essential human condition, but the groundless of all forms of being.

Both of these waves of criticism, the essay argues, tend to overlook a central dynamic in Beckett’s writing, in which a rejection of forms of reference coincides with a longing, however residual, for forms of political community. The urge towards solitude in Beckett is countered by an equally strong urge towards company, towards shared life. To begin to articulate a Beckettian politics, as part of a third wave of Beckett criticism, it is necessary to develop a critical language that can account at once for Beckett’s negativity – his refusal of political commitments – and for his persistent attachment to the word that he seems to disavow.

To think about the limits (of a text, of a being, of a place) is to think about adulteration. It is to recognise that, at their limits, things merge with other things.

This essay proposes that such thinking has taken on a particular urgency in our own time, an urgency that is at once biopolitical and geopolitical. The spread of a virus has forced us to examine our individual biopolitical limits, as the collapse of a geopolitical ideology – one which allied US capital to progressive democratisation – has forced us to examine the boundaries, between east and west, between north and south, that have shaped the global distribution of wealth and force.

Under these conditions there is a tendency to immerse ourselves in our own person, to withdraw from the porous limits of self, of household, of nation, to some ground zero of being. We look to the imagined grounds of a minimal life that is self-directed and self-sufficient, that is proof against contamination by whatever lies beyond its pale.

We might call this contracted state a condition of mere being – the mere being that remains when our political life, our being in relation to others, is attenuated or forsaken. But this essay suggests that close attention to literary accounts of mere being, from Henry James to Wallace Stevens to Samuel Beckett, helps us to see that poetic mereness is not a denial of shared being, but a particular means of imagining it, a means of approaching that place where we are conjoined with others. In tracing a poetic tradition of mere being, the essay argues that what we find in the dramatically denuded self is not a retreat from limits, but an encounter with them – an encounter which grants us a new way of imagining what Densher calls, in The Wings of the Dove, ‘our being as we are’.