The Introduction contextualises the book’s broader arguments by sketching out its overall narrative arc – relating to the contested consolidation of memories of the inter-war period – exploring previous explanations of this problem and foregrounding this book’s focus on everyday conversations about recent history. The Introduction explains the broader significance of these arguments for histories of popular politics and political history’s methods more broadly.

This introduction establishes the wide variety of cultural and historical contexts that Jazz and American Culture covers by revisiting five moments across the past century. Beginning with the first recording by a Black woman in 1920 and moving to the pandemic summer of 2020, these five vignettes present us not with a straight line through American history but instead offer a series of nodes that suggest the complicated ways jazz has been entangled with American politics, aesthetic upheavals, technological and economic changes, and the lived experience of the everyday. Most importantly, these select moments across the history of jazz and American culture– spanning Jim Crow to George Floyd– remind us how the music’s development out of African American expressive culture is key to understanding both its ongoing response to the violence of American racism and its incisive critique of American democracy’s failures.

Since the 1920s, American writers have evinced a fascination with and investment in fictional representations of jazz music and jazz musicians. As this essay demonstrates, part of jazz’s appeal for fiction writers is that it offers the opportunity to explore various kinds of border crossing. This essay surveys several jazz fictions to explicate how these fictions portray jazz as a local event, often focusing on musicians who may not be known beyond their own communities, but who live to play the music. Using Nathaniel Mackey’s concept of artistic othering, this essay investigates how writers portray the jazz musician’s search for a space to belong, where artistic forms of risk-taking are affirmed and the contingencies jazz musicians face, whether it be in the form of substance abuse, underemployment, self-doubt, or social injustice can be managed through instances where self-repair, improvisation, and community constitute the foundations of the musician’s lifeworld. Jazz fiction, in other words, is deeply concerned with the contradictions of American life and how playing jazz music involves the act of containing contradictions.

This chapter moves beyond Fambul Tok and looks at how processes of transition and justice occur outside of the official scope and discourse, or through what I refer to as unrecognized mechanisms. I problematize the notion of transition, looking again at the official transitional justice discourses and contrast these with interview narratives that demonstrate the fluidity of conflict and post-conflict periods. The chapter further examines how unrecognized mechanisms that were employed by Sierra Leoneans served as more meaningful avenues of ‘transitioning’ past their war-related experiences. Individuals engaged in everyday activities, such as economic restoration, agriculture and religion in an effort to transition to what I call a new normal. The importance of the everyday and re-obtaining a sense of normality were key priorities. Individuals, therefore, define and enact their own ideas of what it means to transition, engaging with alternative, often more immediate and pragmatic, channels within their existing social structures to reach their own defined goals. Using Sierra Leone as an example, this chapter demonstrates how individuals in post-conflict societies are active agents in defining and facilitating their own post-conflict processes, thereby recognizing the unrecognized and understanding notions of transition and justice at work.

This chapter provides the core argument and engages with concepts and theories relevant to the book. It begins with a comprehensive literature review of the turn to the local within transitional justice. While local transitional justice mechanisms are supposed to better align with the needs and priorities of affected populations, often these programs are measured against their own goals, or normative expectations of transitional justice, which overlooks how individuals and communities navigate these programs in multiple and diverse ways. This book examines different types of agency of Sierra Leoneans in what I refer to as recognised and unrecognised local transitional justice processes. Using Fambul Tok as an example of a recognised local transitional justice program, the book explores how various types of agency are involved in constructing and shaping local TJ programs, often resulting in a range of unintended consequences. This book builds upon scholarship in a range of disciplines including peace and conflict studies, anthropology, development, politics and social and legal studies. Ultimately, the book argues that justice does not happen to or for people, but that is an act in and of itself. It illustrates how local programs and processes actually work in practice.

The Introduction first highlights the value added of practice approaches to international relations, and demonstrates how a practice perspective differs from other IR theoretical approaches. The chapter then offers a contextualization of practice theories in IR through a historical discussion that highlights the foundations of practice theoretical thought, its connections to, and shared assumptions with preceding IR scholarship, but also the ways in which it fundamentally differs from other theoretical approaches. With this narrative we respond to some allegations and misunderstandings within the discipline that the practice talk is plainly a reinvigoration of old ideas, that there is little new about practice approaches, or that they present us with a new version of constructivism. Third, we proceed in discussing the scope and contours of practice-driven research by discussing how the practice debate might be ordered. Arguing against pitching discrete practice approaches against each other, we draw attention to a number of fault lines that run through the practice debate, such as stability and change. We then showcase how each chapter in this volume engages with broader IR scholarship, and how it provides a new practice-driven vista on relevant IR questions.

This chapter starts by asking ‘What is in a Thing?’ It discusses the material presence of the past and its rediscovery, for example, in the history of commodities. Material culture history, it argues, has been critical of the linguistic turn but is still building on insights from it. It proposes that objects provide an ‘order of things’ (Michel Foucault), which is in need of examination and contextualisation. At the same time material culture history has also been in the vanguard of decentring human agency and problematising the ‘Anthropocene’. Using non-representational theory, it has been arguing in favour of recognising the agency of things and decentring human agency in history. Material culture history has also been pointing to the longevity of material objects, providing them with often malleable and multiple meanings. It is striking how prominent everyday objects are in material culture histories. Through them individual identities are often related to larger collective identities. Historians of material culture have contributed to raising our awareness of the link between objects and collective identity formation. Examples from national history, environmental history, first nations hsitory, the history of ethnic minorities, colonial history, cultural history, design history, architectural history, regional history, class history, gender history and religious history are all discussed in oder to underline the potential of material culture history to lead to greater self-reflexivity among historians about their role in constructing forms of collective identity and to deconstruct these identities.

In ‘A Medical Document’ (1894), Theodore Foster, a prosperous GP from the Midlands, speaks of the divergent incidence of the disease practitioners encountered and the medical afflictions that occur in fiction. He cannily notes that medical conditions are commonly used to provide or support melodrama and sensation but rarely to promote the kind of everyday occurrences that give definition to realism. These more quotidian representations of medical practice in popular fiction are at the centre of this chapter. Looking directly at the commonplace in Conan Doyle’s series collected under the title Round the Red Lamp (1894) and L. T. Meade’s Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (1893–95), as well as considering it in relation to its much more common fraternity in the genres of romance, the chapter reveals not only the significance of the everyday for portrayals of professionalised medicine, but also shows how realist representation is a vehicle for emerging critiques of medical knowledge making. The chapter moves beyond the normal register of the anxieties generated by fin-de-siècle medicine to focus on the often overlooked territory of pharmacology, reading fin-de-siècle medical fictions for both the sensational and the everyday when it came to how physic and new drugs were used and abused.