The Conclusion puts the results of the study into a larger perspective. All throughout the Hellenistic period, the field of athletics played a crucial role in the cultural and political history of the Greek world. Especially the third century can be identified as a heyday of Greek athletics. Various agonistic cultures emerged or existed alongside each other, most notably in Sparta, Thessaly, and Ptolemaic Egypt. With regard to the three different levels of agonistic representation, a logic of compensation is unveiled as a key motif on the level of the polis, whereas different strategies of agonistic representation are detected for the level of the kings. Finally, the emergence of a “new society of victors” including at least twenty-six female horse owners, non-Greeks, and successful royals represents one of the most important historical developments in the history of Hellenistic athletics.

The final chapter draws out conclusions from a century of Indo-German relations. It shows the deep limits of treating nations and nationalism simplistically as barriers to international integration. The growing interconnectedness of the world did not challenge the ideas of nationalism but rather reinvigorated it. Nationalism is not the opposite of globalization but a part of it. To better integrate nations into our understanding of international business history and strategy, this chapter shows that we need to move beyond a transactional view of international business steeped in the assumption that nationalism introduces political risks and increases transaction costs, towards a relational view in which multinationals are understood as integral players in an evolving geopolitical landscape comprised of national communities. Such a view considers how multinationals navigate two sets of relationships that characterize nations: the relationships that define the nation as an imagined community with a collective past and an aspirational future and the relationships that define the nation in relation to other nations. These relationships allow us to consider the ways in which the economics of international business are inseparable from the politics and ideology of the global economy.

The pragmatic partnership among West European nations that has emerged since 1945 exemplifies how “win-win” strategies can bring powerfully beneficial results over time. Yet the EU model cannot be straightforwardly applied at the global level, for five reasons. First, the cultural and political differences among the world’s nations are much greater than they are within Europe. Second, the obscene divide between “haves” and “have-nots” is much starker and more intractable at the global level than it is within Europe. Third, rapid globalization has caused a political backlash in many nations, bringing to power leaders who seek a defensive retrenchment behind national walls. Fourth, global institutions of cultural integration, such as UNESCO, remain relatively weak. And fifth, racist prejudice and nativist xenophobia are on the rise in many nations. Nevertheless, the historical precedent set by the EU demonstrates that national sovereignty can be incrementally dismantled, yielding new forms of institutionalized cooperation among formerly separate and mutually hostile peoples.

Why have so many Latin American authors recently taken up themes of Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust? This introduction re-caps the development of Latin American literary production from the nineteenth century to the present in order to explain why it is a notable trend that can tell us about phenomena as diverse as literary generations, globalization, racism, precarious labour, dictatorship, democracy, ethics and ontology. It investigates whether narratives from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil have anything in common in their approaches to the subject; and whether they are similar or distinct from works by their canonized precursors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Carlos Onetti and Ricardo Piglia. Ultimately, this introduction sets out a framework for understanding a gradual shift in Latin American literature, from novels underpinning the ‘imagined communities’ of nations (Benedict Anderson), to authors deconstructing these and instead gesturing towards ‘inoperative communities’ (Jean-Luc Nancy).

The third part to this work employs a body of scholarly literature to both highlight the presence of the past in mass mediation and the reciprocal nature between mass media and the society it serves. By focusing on the existence of “mediated memories” in Israeli and Palestinian mass media, Scoop on the Past illustrates the usage of the past as a prospective memory in line with the society’s contemporary concerns. Both in Israeli-Jewish society and in Palestinian society, traditional forms of mass media are analyzed that in the period under review have enjoyed the largest readership and circulation and, consequently, constitute the most important cadres sociaux. An historical analysis of media content produced on the respective memorial days – Yom ha-Shoah and Yawm al-Nakbah – highlights the construction and maintenance of a national collective memory vis-à-vis these historical events. The primary focus on anniversary journalism is accompanied by a secondary analysis on the construction of daily Nakba and Holocaust media memories. In this context, semi-structured interviews held with Palestinian and Israeli journalists on their role as memory agents testify to the desire and need to include their societies’ respective pasts in routine media so as to continually evoke the past and its contemporary meaning.

This essay charts key aspects of the development of canonical literary criticism in the English-speaking Caribbean. It argues that a full understanding of the ways in which proliferating critical statements coalesced into a major body of evaluative work across the decades, from the 1930s through the 1970s, needs to account for the diverse and intersecting communicative platforms the criticism relied upon. The burgeoning criticism responded to the blossoming of anglophone Caribbean literature in the post World War II period via print venues such as Bim in Barbados, Kyk-over-al in Guyana, and the Jamaica Journal and Caribbean Quarterly in Jamaica. In addition, during the decades of the 1940s and 1950s, the BBC literary radio programme Caribbean Voices functioned as a platform for the production and dissemination of Caribbean literary and cultural criticism. As such, the development of the critical canon in the anglophone Caribbean is not only the story of intersecting and mutually supportive media, print and electronic, but also the story of transatlantic knowledge flows. The essay therefore proposes that the intersection of print and electronic media and the robust transatlantic knowledge flows call into question, in the contemporary moment, any enduring distinction between those putative binaries that energized so many of the critical arguments of the period, viz. home vs. exile, oral vs. scribal, and folk criticism vs. cosmopolitan practice.