This final chapter offers theoretical reflections on rupture and creativity and on the need to struggle for epistemological independence in postcolonial Africa.

Chapter 4 looks at the restitution of liberalism as a potential model for political change during the Arab Spring and then its inability to shape outcomes in Egypt and Syria due to structural, organizational, and international reasons. The chapter refutes the narrative that the Arab Spring was the result of a leaderless movement of an alienated youth and loose associations of activists. It asserts that this overall analysis ignores the years of liberal activism against the extant patterns of domination and authority in the region, and the fact that protestors rallied behind a set of ideas that were consistently different from the ones rallied behind in the 1950s–1960s.What is missed in most studies is the deep and consistent transformation and reformulation of the object of discontent. Millions confronted their States despite the threat of violence, and in so doing they showed that liberal notions were vibrantly hiding in plain sight.

This chapter investigates a selected translation and reception history of Catullus 85 in English, with a focus on Brandon Brown’s embodied retranslation. The chapter argues that embodied, iterative, intersemiotic, and pedagogicial translation strategies create ruptures in the hegemonic approaches to translating Catullus 85 in particular and canonical ancient Classical texts in general. These ruptures invite readers to engage more critically with old texts in new and renewed ways.

One of the most surprising expressions that captures a self-conscious positioning in time comes in a remarkable poem in Book 1 of the Palatine Anthology. The poem is not an epigram at all, despite its inclusion in the anthology, but rather a 76-line poem of dedication celebrating the construction of the church of St Polyeuctos in Constantinople. The church was rebuilt in the early sixth century by Anicia Juliana, who came from one of the most distinguished family lines in eastern Greek Christian nobility. Indeed, the original church had been built in the fifth century by the empress Eudocia, who was Juliana’s great-grandmother. Juliana, in her act of rebuilding, was certainly engaging in the familiar competitiveness, aimed at both contemporary and historical rivals, that continued Hellenistic euergetism – the public display of wealth and authority through the sponsoring of public buildings – in order to contribute to the splendid redesign of Christian urban space.

Despite early studies indicating fault rupture both before and after deglaciation, it has long been hypothesized that glacially induced faults in Fennoscandia ruptured only once. The now widespread availability of high-resolution digital elevation models allows for testing this hypothesis by examining cross-cutting relationships between the scarps and both glacial and postglacial landforms. Although not widespread, such cross-cutting relationships indicate that segments of the Merasjärvi, Lainio and Pärvie faults have ruptured at least twice. The timing of the Merasjärvi ruptures is unknown; the Lainio ruptures occurred both before and after deglaciation, and at least one of the Pärvie ruptures is postglacial.

Additionally, it can be demonstrated that parallel segments of the Pärvie and Lansjärv faults ruptured at different times despite being only a few kilometres from each other. Given these results, the single rupture hypothesis must be reassessed for the high-relief scarps in northern Sweden, but it may still hold true for some of the low-relief scarps.

European integration is in crisis. Paradoxically, disintegration seems to be a transnational tendency. While one cannot say that proportionality bears the dynamics of disintegration itself, relevant tendencies affect its form and function in different settings. This chapter offers a particular reading of proportionality cases that have provoked much discussion among French, English and Greek legal actors. I argue that what is new about these cases is not so much the application of proportionality itself, which follows already existing local patterns characterising the reception and the evolution of proportionality. Rather, it is the particular context of disintegration in which proportionality operates. Indeed, what is observed in these much debated uses of proportionality is a rupture in the traditional local patterns of Europeanisation.

Reflection on food cultivation in modern cities opens up new lines of inquiry into the past, showing examples of civic authorities on the one hand, and community groups and individuals on the other, creating cultivated spaces for food production in periods of social and economic transformation. Examples from tenth-century Rome introduce the different kinds of evidence available for a study of the phenomenon, both material and textual. The material evidence of the cities of Italy (roads, houses, public buildings, and parks) provides the backdrop of urban change, the gaps in the urban fabric into which new gardens were placed. The available documentary evidence comprises charters of land sales, rents, and donations of urban properties, and there is discussion here of how those sources were produced and what they can tell us about the fabric of early medieval Italian cities as well as the people who lived in them. The chapter then sketches the historiographic landscape of the subject. Urban cultivation and gardening has long been recognised to have existed in early medieval Italy, but its relevance to broader pictures of social and economic history has not yet been evaluated.

This chapter develops an account of citizen sociolinguistic acts, as distinct from systemic social movements or organized social action. Citizen sociolinguistic acts are momentary ruptures that reveal tacit assumptions behind our everyday use of language. As such they may lead to change, but they may not. In any case, these acts of talking about language transform subjects into citizen sociolinguists. Acts, as idiosyncratic and situationally specific, have existential qualities of that remain outside typical top-down social theoretical explanations like Marxism’s theory of capital, or a Foucauldian system of discipline. Instead, acts of citizen sociolinguistics, like those we’ve been discussing throughout this volume – acts of sociolinguistic arrest or wonderment – consist simply of encounters with another person. These acts of citizen sociolinguistics do not, on their own, reconfigure systemic relations, ethics, or spoken language, any more than an act of kindness or an act of violence might. They are not large-scale curricular reforms or policy changes. However, they raise our awareness of our humanity and relatedness, and the role of language in it, in ways that can provoke further talk and have a societal impact.

"This chapter considers the role of institutions in re-building trust and connection for families in exile. It introduces the evolutionary evidence that human beings are co-operative breeders and that, as a result, the need to belong and connect to communities or groups is central for human flourishing. It draws on reflections on the experiences of refugees, which are shaped by the destruction of human connectedness. In this context, the chapter explores the role of the institutions and service providers who come in contact with refugee people and families. It discusses the approaches systems create to re-build trust and connection in the post-trauma phase and argues that these approaches can indeed lead to the re-building and re-making of trust, but that they can also create a re-enacting and re-breaking of trust and connectedness. Thus, it is useful to explore frameworks and principles that may assist in shaping approaches so that relational repair, and not further rupture, can occur. In the final section, the chapter recommends therapeutic practices for practitioners to consider when doing the work of re-building trust for refugee families."

Beginning with an ethnography of controversy in the representation of time at the Giant’s Causeway, County Antrim, this chapter focuses on the role of catastrophe as rupture in time, confronting us with the transformative potential of events that render planetary history radically discontinuous. Yet while in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of the earth sciences catastrophism became displaced as orthodoxy by uniformitarian explanations, becoming a shadow mode of explanation associated primarily with Christian Biblical literalism, the significance of catastrophe in earth history has re-emerged in a distinct form through the recognition of mass extinction events. Indeed, it has a particular contemporary significance, as we increasingly recognise our own extractive relationship with time as catastrophe: vectors of a mass extinction event, the likes of which have occurred only five times in the last 540 million years or so.

The Conclusion traces the fruits of Ancien Régime imperial innovation and colonial experimentation into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to establish a new perspective on how continuity, innovation, and rupture conditioned the broader narrative of French colonial empire. It looks at the long road to the creation of the DOM-TOM (départements et territoires d’outre-mer) as well as at the ideological underpinnings of French imperial incursions into West and North Africa. Based on this brief overview, it proposes a non-linear history French colonial empire.

The introduction presents the book’s main arguments and historiographical interventions and offers an overview of its methodology and archival sources.