The chapter reviews the scholarly interpretations of abolition that have appeared in the last two decades. One group, influenced by Eric Williams, looks for economic motivations stemming from a decline of the British plantation sector; a second focuses on rebellions by slaves, the chief of which was that in St. Domingue, which gave birth to Haiti in 1802. Some in this category see the slaves freeing themselves. Others argue for long-run changes in public attitudes toward violence within Western Europe, especially England, that occurred in the 150 years after the British established their Caribbean plantations. In the eighteenth century the nascent London press began to report slaves resistance to enslavement both on board slave ships and in Caribbean colonies. These reports became more frequent and more detailed as the century progressed. Other cruelties such as burning at the stake, abandoning children, masters’ right to chastise their servants, and the lords’ power over their serfs (in mainland Europe) either ceased or became less frequently exercised. At the same time awareness of Africans and their forced use in the Americas as represented in the London press greatly increased after 1750. Where “slaves” meant English captives in North Africa at the beginning of the century, by 1800 the term referred to Blacks in the Americas.

This chapter focuses attention on covert or unattributable propaganda conducted in India by the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department. Between the outbreak of the Sino-Indian border war in 1962, and the Indian general election of 1967, IRD operations in the subcontinent peaked. At the time, the Indian government welcomed British support in an information war waged against Communist China. However, cooperation between London and New Delhi quickly waned. Britain’s propaganda initiative in India lacked strategic coherence and cut across the grain of local resistance to anti-Soviet material. The British Government found itself running two separate propaganda campaigns in the subcontinent: one openly focused on Communist China; and a second, secret programme, targeting the Soviet Union. Whitehall found it difficult to implement an integrated and effective anti-communist propaganda offensive in India. The chapter also recovers the importance of nonaligned nations in the story of Cold War covert propaganda and reveals that India was never a passive player in the propaganda Cold War.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the term “literature” was used broadly to describe any printed text. By the turn of the century, its meaning had narrowed to refer specifically to aesthetic verbal objects with distinctive features of authorship and form. This change was brought on by rapid transformations in print culture. Literature created its readership mainly through periodicals: newspapers, leaflets, pamphlets, illustrated weeklies, magazines of mass and high culture. Periodicals were not only the medium for all literary genres but were also key in the professionalization of writers and the making of national literatures. They were a powerful tool to shape the literary imagination of a growing and increasingly more diversified reading public. Through the publication of serialized novels, essays, and reviews, periodicals such as La Nación, Sud-América, and Caras y Caretas were essential to the process of literary autonomy in Argentina. In this chapter the history of this process is outlined and those cases in which developments in print culture framed some of the most significant works of Argentine literature are discussed.

As the cases of the Jesús, Maria, y José and the San Juan Baptista made their way through the High Court of Admiralty, the arguments that would eventually be laid before the Court of Prize Appeal took shape. This chapter examines the arguments made in each case and how they affected Anglo-Spanish negotiations over neutrality. The chapter also focuses on the debates between British and Spanish ministers about the meaning and interpretation of the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of 1667 which governed Spanish neutral rights. It introduces two key people in Anglo-Spanish negotiations, Felix D’Abreu (Spanish representative in London) and Sir Benjamin Keene (British ambassador to Spain). Both men would be instrumental in shaping the debates on Spanish neutral rights and whether those rights could be protected through decisions handed down by the Court of Prize Appeal.

Explores the ascent of Richard Nixon to the presidency during the Vietnam War era, his presidency, his abuses of presidential power, and the many aspects of the Watergate affair that spawned multiple investigations by prosecutors, Congress, and the press and finally led to Nixon’s resignation to avoid impeachment.

All news is fake news, because all reports are to some extent ‘made up’ by the time they are received by a mediated consumer distanced from the original source. ‘Fake’, from the Latin facere (to make, to do), is a member of the family of making words that includes fact, factory, fashion, artificial, and face. It is ironic that the standard test for whether news is ‘fake’ is to subject it to ‘fact-checking’. Facts themselves are things – artefacts – that we make through artificial processes of Creation and Production. Any ‘fact’ deserving of the name is something established by some process involving human skill and judgment. What matters is not whether news or facts are made up – they always are – but how they are made up and what relation there is between the thing at source and the thing as made up for public reception. Public reception also plays its part in the broadcast of fake news. We therefore need to think in terms of ‘receiver responsibility’, from the case of the journalist who receives the factual grain of a promising story to the editor who publishes journalists’ copy to the online user who re-tweets a tweet.

In mid-1953, Abu Mayanja and Munu Sipalo left to study in Britain and India respectively. Chapter 2 follows them to explain the growing importance of information circulation in this cohort’s anticolonial culture. The opportunities they found for pursuing anticolonial activism in the urban hubs of London and Delhi need to be understood within the framework of the early 1950s (anti-communist) socialist internationalism in Western Europe and newly independent Asian countries, specifically through the Socialist International and Asian Socialist Conference. Young, mobile East and Central Africans were critical to the visions of these organisations and the networks that linked them. But Sipalo’s attempts to run an Africa Bureau and organise a pan-African conference, and Mayanja’s attempts to find a platform in the British press were constrained by experiences of racism, and by the ignorance and skewed priorities of anticolonial sympathisers and patrons. Mayanja’s trip to a Moral Re-Armament ‘multiracial’ spiritual centre in the Swiss Alps epitomised some of the paradoxes of this cohort’s information campaign. Much of this is lost when reading this as a history of students abroad.

What was the relationship between a revolutionary African state and the postcolonial media? This chapter analyses the evolution of the press in Dar es Salaam after independence. By the mid-1970s, Tanzania had just two national daily newspapers, one of which was owned by the party, the other by the state. But this was not the outcome of a teleological slide from an independent to a muzzled media, as liberal Cold War-era conceptions of the ‘freedom of the press’ would have it. This chapter shows how the press became a contested site of socialist politics in Dar es Salaam’s internationalised media world. Stakeholders debated questions of who should own newspapers, who should work for them, and what they should write in them. Even when the government nationalised the country’s only independent English-language newspaper, it placed it under the control of a radical, foreign editor and emphasised the need for it to serve as a critical voice. However, when this editorial independence transgressed Tanzania’s foreign policy, the state moved to bring the press under closer control, justified by Third World trends towards ‘development media’.

Molière’s extraordinary success between 1659 and 1673 was due not only to his virtuosity as a dramatist, his comic talent or his exploitation of current affairs; it was due also to his feeling for an ‘event’ and his ability to capture attention. This contribution studies his unprecedented investment in publicity, which mobilised a multitude of forms and mediums, as well as its reliance on a network of agents with varied motivations. Literary history has long tried to distinguish between Molière’s friends and enemies by relying on their praise or criticism of him. This contribution studies them rather as agents who, depending on the context, opportunity and their own interests, sometimes acted for and sometimes against Molière, without this indicating either personal enmity or ties of affection.

Chapter 4 shows how the October 2019 killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became a platform for President Trump’s visual and verbal consolidations of necropolitical law. Announcing the killing at a press conference held at the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, Trump positioned himself in front of a portrait of America’s first president, George Washington, visually asserting Trump’s lineage in an always already necropolitical state, built, as it is, on the racialized pillars of territorial appropriation, genocide, and slavery. With the many flags of the US armed forces flanking Trump like an honor guard, the visuals of Trump’s announcement encode the two bodies of president/commander-in-chief, foregrounding the military as a key actor in the state’s implementation of necropolitical law. Chapter 4 shows how Trump used the occasion, first, to deepen the necropolitical separations animating necropolitical law and, second, to stage himself as the White, male, militarized hero central to spectacles of imperialism. Chapter 4 demonstrates how normalizing the necropolitics of imperialism past and present fosters the discounting of life legitimized by necropolitical law.

Chapter 2 provides a review of the existing literature on the representation of, and attitudes towards, mental illness in a variety of text types (e.g. online data, newspaper data, spoken data) and across a range of analytical disciplines. In addition to exploring research on the representation of mental illness in these different data types and disciplines, the theoretical position of Social Constructionism (particularly in reference to CDA) is discussed.

Often studied as a transitory step towards the late consolidation of Italian opera in Mexico, the activities of the Spanish tenor and composer Manuel García in Mexico City from 1827 to 1829 call for a more nuanced analysis. The spatial reconceptualisation pursued by transnational and global histories as well as the redefinition of cultural borders triggered by postcolonial studies give us the tools to address García’s Mexican career as a key moment in terms of understanding the effects and issues raised by the spread of Italian opera in Latin America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The chapter rethinks García's activities in Mexico City as comprising one of the first (while at the same time highly problematic) cultural encounters between Europe and the young Latin American nation after its emancipation from Spain (1821). Until then, mutual perceptions between Europe and Mexico were distorted by the intrusive cultural politics of imperial Spain. After independence, such misperceptions became more marked. Perceived as a familiar expressions of Europeanness, Italian opera became the arena where issues of identity and otherness were discussed. A close reading of the operas García composed for Mexican audiences will reveal how Italian opera changed by absorbing and reflecting the multiple postcolonial tensions of Mexico City.

In the 1820s, a stable company of Italian singers was in charge of the operatic performances staged at the Imperial Theatre in Rio de Janeiro. Working together with a French ballet troupe, those soloists joined forces to present their repertoire before a heterogeneous audience. Works by Rossini and his contemporaries were sung in the original language, subscriptions were sold for annual seasons and Italian masterpieces crowned the theatrical festivities offered to the Emperor. The chapter examines this recently independent country’s attraction for foreign singers and looks at how these artists were able to pursue their careers in a totally different milieu to that to which they had been accustomed, living in a city that offered great opportunities, but also considerable challenges to newcomers. A small group of Italian singers were employed by a local impresario, with the aim of making opera a viable cultural activity at an Imperial Court that was proud of its connections with Europe, yet they also struggled with economic difficulties and the country’s political instability. The press assumed a central role in negotiating the relationship between artists and their audiences, revealing a growing public interest in opera, its backstage and the lives of its protagonists.

The chapter examines Alberto Franchetti’s Germania, written primarily for the Italian opera market and premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan (1902); and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Der Roland von Berlin, commissioned by the German Emperor Wilhelm II to celebrate the Hohenzollern dynasty, and premiered at the Berlin court opera in 1904. Starting with a brief summary of the two operas’ origins and plots, the chapter illustrates how in both cases operatic italianità was used to represent German national myths. Conventional concepts of operatic italianità were challenged through musical references to German folk songs. German critics employed generic meanings of italianità to articulate their disdain at these 'foreign' depictions of national identity, claiming an exclusive right for German composers to write on patriotic topics. As a consequence, productions of Franchetti’s and Leoncavallo’s works in Imperial Germany provoked some of the most hostile reactions ever articulated against Italian composers during the years before World War I. Furthermore, the defamation of Leoncavallo included a barely concealed criticism of the emperor himself.

The importance of opera and operatic practices to nineteenth-century Latin American culture has been widely acknowledged; opera was central to the construction of ideas about liberalism, Europeanism, cosmopolitanism and the all-encompassing notion of 'civilisation'. The centrality of opera and of opera houses in the region, however, often obscures the ways in which opera, and Italian opera in particular, were being read. Taking account of the multiplicity and heterogeneity of operatic experiences in the region, the chapter examines the experience of Italian opera singers in the southern Andes (Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador) during the 1840s, a period of major expansion of opera throughout Latin America. Often these singers were the first to perform opera in the region. How did they live the experience of being Italian and singing Italian opera in South America? Based on newspapers, archival documents and private letters, the chapter demonstrates how, for many of these singers, producing opera in Latin America was neither marked by a direct projection of their previous Italian experiences, nor was it seen as an exotic transatlantic adventure. Instead, it was something in between: a constant process of negotiation between their private and public identities.

As the first textual document to be produced following an individual’s death, the obituary is often the starting point of any biography, a work which by nature requires a retrospective assessment of the experiences of a concluded life. Yet despite the value and relevance of biographical literature to the field of musicology, the obituaries of composers are rarely employed as source material by historians of music. The death of Gioachino Rossini, one of the first true global celebrities in the history of music, provoked a tremendous international media response whose full extent may only be speculated upon. This chapter examines and compares obituaries of the composer from the French, English, German and Austrian press, bringing to light in condensed form the then-predominant narratives of Rossini’s life. The reading of these obituaries reveals a general transnational perspective on Italian opera, typical of the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as the national peculiarities of Rossini’s reception.