The transnational turn in American literary studies has forged new epistemologies and approaches for thinking about postnational cultural forms while centering empire and imperialism in the development of US culture. This chapter reviews these critical conversations and takes up the recent concept of the Black Pacific to examine how the redefinition of the United States as an empire-state rather than as a nation-state has transformed the study of race and comparative racialization in the long nineteenth century. In so doing, the essay considers some lesser-studied Black American writings on and responses to the Philippine–American War as part of an emerging Black American discourse on the Pacific, as Asia became more geopolitically significant to the United States. The essay pays particular attention to publications from the era’s most influential Black literary magazine, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine. Specifically, it examines the complex Black American reception history of José Rizal’s landmark novel of Filipino nationalism, Noli Me Tangere (1887), which was translated from Spanish into English and published in the United States as two dramatically different abridged novels in 1900.

In this chapter we explore a manually annotated subset of data from the corpora studied in this book, which have been analysed to show the presence of narratives as understood by researchers studying this concept. In this narrative study we return to an exploration of differences arising from L1 and cultural background and, inter alia, conclude that cultural background may have an important role to play in the frequency and nature of narrative. In drawing such conclusions, we refer, where appropriate, to existing research on SLA and narrative. Overall, the study suggests that, while there are similarities between L1 and L2 narrative use, there are also differences, some attributable to the learner, others to the task/context in which the data was gathered.

This chapter considers the experience of visitors to Flavius’ tomb after his death, particularly as they drank alongside Flavius while he was portrayed doing the same.

Having accepted an editorship at Science after research trips to Baffinland and the Pacific Northwest, the young Franz Boas, not yet the eminence he would become, penned an essay laying out the theoretical conclusions he had drawn following his time in the field. Though ostensibly concerned with geography – Boas had trained as a geographer – the essay addresses methodological problems that would later shape the discipline of cultural anthropology, which coalesced under Boas’s leadership in the early decades of the twentieth century.

In this chapter the macro-structures in the TLC, its L1/L1 counterpart and the spoken BNC 2014 are compared. The results broadly divide into three groups: discourse unit functions, which are shared across all three corpora; task-specific discourse unit functions; and a number of discourse unit functions unique to individual corpora. The overall findings are that the construct used in the test in the Trinity corpus is a good match, in terms of discourse unit functions, for everyday conversational English, but also that some apparent differences, especially in Dimension 1, are illusory. The analysis of the BNC and the L1/L1 Trinity corpus leads to a revision of the Dimension 1 data for the L2/L1 Trinity corpus, which has the effect of making all three corpora more similar functionally. The chapter also explores the possibility of meso-structures within the discourse units and uses the concept of face to explain some of its findings. Throughout, the presence of narrative is so salient in all three corpora that the chapter concludes with a decision to explore narrative in more detail.

Chapter 3 reconstructs the functioning of the European legislative process in practice. To this end, it systematizes the main normative instruments that steer and discipline the behavior of European political actors and civil servants, including the (rather bare) Treaty provisions, the relevant interinstitutional agreements, the European Parliament’s Rules of Procedure, and the provisions set out in internal documents, especially administrative circulars. This chapter posits that administrative circulars are important for institutional interactions, as they contribute to regularizing the conduct of political actors (regulative component), creating normative expectations (normative component), and generating values, beliefs, and assumptions that actors internalize and accept as part of their “repertoire of unquestioned routines and habits” (cultural-cognitive component). As far as trilogues are concerned, all these provisions testify to the existence of a norms-based, institutionalized environment, congenial to legal analysis.

Bengali migrants became distinctly visible in the Malay public space in the late nineteenth century. Their professional world has been discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, showing that they gradually created a diasporic space with other migrant communities, such as the Chinese and Tamils. When it comes to social spaces, the Bengalis carved them out in several ways: by maintaining intergenerational communication, fostering multiculturalism, continuing interaction with other diasporic communities and forming transnational families in Malaya. These multidimensional aspects of space-making made the Bengali diaspora an integral part of the Malay cosmopolitan world, a role only enhanced by the contributions to Malaya's decolonisation process after WWII. This chapter explores how the Bengalis carved out a place for themselves through interactions with other communities, political practices and involvement in making institutions of social and political importance.

Intergenerational communication

When Ramnath Biswas was travelling in Malacca, an elderly ‘Sundarban Bengkalis’ invited him to have dinner with his family. The Sundarban Bengkalis served eastern Bengal food and spoke in an unusual accent, prompting Biswas to learn more about the so-called Sundarban Bengkalis. He later had another opportunity to learn about them from a Bengali named Deepak, who spoke in the Barisal dialect and lived in a Portuguese mahalla (a residential area or unit). According to Deepak, when Buddhism declined in Bengal, many Bengali Buddhists from the Sundarbans migrated to Pulau Bengkalis. This dispersion continued during the Portuguese and Maghs plunder at the Bay of Bengal and Sundarban areas. This diffuse community was mostly composed of fishermen in Bengal. They upheld the same profession at Pulau Bengkalis. After fishing in the Straits, they brought the fish to sell in the Malacca market. Later, some settled in Malacca and converted to Christianity. Deepak said that the Bengalis who migrated from Pulau Bengkalis to Malacca were known as Sundarban Bengkalis. A few primary and secondary sources corroborate Deepak's narrative. For instance, Lloyd and Moore suggested that the Indians settled in the tiny fishing village and married local girls before the Muslim arrival. The Suma Oriental and the Report of Balthasar Bort, Dutch–Malacca Governor (1665–1677), both explain that the Bengali fishermen settled and engaged in the fishing profession in Malacca.

I grew up and went to school in the multi-culture of Kalimpong—the town that is the focus and main protagonist of this book. My father, a trader-adventurer, landed up in Kalimpong from Rangpo, a town across the border in the Kingdom of Sikkim, which was then a British protectorate. His father in turn had been working in Singtam (also in Sikkim) for a firm with connections to Kalimpong. This was on the heels of Colonel Francis Younghusband's ‘opening up’ of the route to Tibet in 1904. My father never really made it economically, nor did he sojourn in Lhasa as many businessmen were then wont to do. Coming of age, not without kvetching, in the Tenth Mile area of the town, I noted there was just a residue of the Indo-Tibetan trade, with descendants of merchants using the conduit via Kathmandu while still hoping that the Jelep-La border would one day reopen. The Chinese families still living in the town mainly ran restaurants or shoe shops. Tibetan refugees, lamas and aristocrats had a considerable presence in the town environs. The mule trains were but a distant memory for old timers as army trucks trundled up and down the roads carrying supplies and military hardware.

I remained quite clueless about the potholes in the ground of history on which I daily trod. It was only when I relocated to the United Kingdom (UK) for my doctoral work, on a different topic, that I kept encountering material on Kalimpong in the British Library, London. It was then that the urge to someday write a book on the town took hold of me. This was not a bad beginning for a scholar specialising in postcolonial studies. It was only much later that this work began to take some sort of shape, its contours cut and circumscribed by the continuities and discontinuities of the colonial experience in Asia. Although the Tibetan side of the story at the border had been written about, it seemed to me that what was lacking was the presence of China in Kalimpong, with all that this implied for the larger story of China–India relations before and after 1947.

Chapter 4 aims at establishing that the fractional charge calculated in Chapter 3 is sharp. To this end, the calculation of the mean value and second cumulant of the electronic charge localized in one of two wells of a double-well potential in quantum mechanics is contrasted to that of the mean value and second cumulant of the fractional charge localized around a soliton in a dimerization profile of polyacetylene support a pair of soliton and anti-soliton defects far apart from each other.

Francisco Javier Vingut was a nineteenth-century Latino educator who dedicated his life to teaching Spanish while living in the United States. Vingut also produced Spanish-language textbooks, compiled a bilingual literary anthology, and published the complete works of such important figures of his day as José Antonio Saco, José María Heredia, and the poet Plácido (Gabriel de la Concepción). This chapter demonstrates how his textbooks and compilations are an integral component of US American literary history. Influencing such US intellectuals as George Folsom and Herman Melville, Vingut’s works also established a series of Latina/o legacies that extend beyond his lifetime. They include Vingut’s impact on the Latina/o educator Luis Felipe Mantilla and his translation of Peter Parley’s Universal History, a translation distributed throughout the Americas. Vingut’s wife, Gertrude Fairfield, has a Latina/o legacy of her own: her novel Naomi Torrente: History of a Woman (1864) is a thematic precursor of the Latinx novels of the 1990s with their focus on the challenges faced by second-generation Latina/o/xs. This chapter contends that Spanish-language textbooks continue to be literary and political in nature. In light of the current book banning across the country and the concurrent attacks on educators, this study is particularly urgent.