This chapter offers an in-depth reflection on the significance of time and temporality to the practice of toleration. Time-shaped Christian imagining of the other as “becoming” and growing into its own image. Constitutions, too, exist within certain temporal rhythms: they bind people within a specific space and in a specific time to a set of fundamental rules and arrangements. The binding of time by constitutions is an assertion of power in the saeculum, but also an expression of a need to better live with diversity. It is vital to the “emancipation” of modern constitutionalism from toleration that the constitution does not require a dominant or exclusive set of temporalities to establish order. Rather, constitutions need to allow for citizens to keep time differently, for example through the protection of rights and freedoms.

When Japanese people confronted the international community in the interwar era, their concerns and ideals about the fringes of the family and marriage were aimed at not only the Japanese metropole but also its colonies like Taiwan. Metropole–colony relations were not as clear as one might expect in that there was no direct institutional connection between Japan and Taiwan regarding marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships. However, this chapter reconstructs their discursive links and reveals how cultural critics, social workers, jurists, and others simultaneously presented their competing visions of social progress in Japan and colonial Taiwan. In Japan, progress appeared in the visions of assuming and ensuring women’s personal independence, choice, and self-awareness; in Taiwan, Japanese colonizers defined progress as incorporating women into society. Despite the hierarchical divergence of the metropolitan and colonial perspectives, however, they converged on emphasizing women’s expected behavior as members of the family and society in the 1930s. Women became the sole bearers of progress, which ultimately engendered the empire.

This chapter offers an intersectional feminist reading of West Side Story that shows how women of color and the gender non-conforming character Anybodys are central to the (partial) redemptive arc of the musical. The narrative and characterizations—as expressed through songs, dances, and score—suggest a path to a better “Somewhere” that requires us to step outside the confines of normative masculinity and femininity which reinforce the boundaries of race and class. Throughout the musical, Anita and Maria must navigate the tensions within the concepts of assimilation and multiculturalism, as well as a social landscape dominated by an anxious and often violent masculinity. Careful attention to performances of these roles, and the character Anybodys, make clear that the belonging they (and we the audience) seek might be found somewhere beyond the reductive and destructive strictures of the gender binary.

This chapter contributes a decolonising analysis of tax primarily in the Canadian settler colonial context. I examine the legal constitution of the First Nations Financial Transparency Act in relation to its attempts to reform First Nations’ governance. I demonstrate how the federal government looked to organise a ‘taxpayer’ ethos amongst First Nations citizens through publicising First Nations band salary details and audits. This taxpayer ethos was meant to simultaneously encourage citizens to critique their governments rather than the Canadian federal government, but also to promote private property on reserves. I make a theoretical argument for the necessity of thinking through tax with a decolonising lens that both specifically respects the sovereignty of Indigenous nations and offers a critique of how tax operates to erode that very sovereignty.

Chapter 6 addresses the common strategy to appear unprejudiced: racial colorblindness. Are individuals in a color-salient society able to not see color? The chapter begins with empirical research on the question of whether people are able to ignore the race and ethnicity of others. As it turns out, people who attempt to ignore race cannot, and tend to have awkward interactions with people of color. Instead of colorblindness being a good strategy to avoid discrimination, colorblindness facilitates the ignoring of discrimination. The pros and cons of a multicultural perspective as an alternative to racial colorblindness is discussed. Implications of the cultural emphasis on colorblindness is interrogated, such as the implicit belief that white people are true Americans, whereas people of color are only provisionally American. Strategies for prejudice reduction end the chapter and include creating more complex social identities and coalition work – organizing across difference.

An examination of a varied set of linguistic phenomena that can be understood as processes of complexification at work in Ur-Aeolic as a variety of Greek that took shape in the context of an isolated speech community –specifically one situated in western Anatolian locales during the Bronze Age.

This chapter discusses the Ontogeny Phylogeny Model (OPM), which focuses on the formation and development of second language phonological systems. It proposes an interrelationship between L2 native-like productions, L1 transfer, and universal factors. The model argues that chronologically, and as style becomes increasingly formal, L2 native-like processes increase, L1 transfer processes decrease, and universal processes increase and then decrease. It further claims that the roles of universals and L1 transfer are mediated by markedness and similarity, both of which slow L2 acquisition. Specifically, in similar phenomena L1 transfer processes persist, while in marked phenomena universal processes persist. The OPM also argues that these same principles obtain for learners acquiring more than one L2, monolingual and bilingual acquisition, and L1 attrition. In addition to the chronological stages and variation of the individual learner, the model claims that these relationships hold true for language variation and change, including pidgins and creoles.

This chapter explores the interplay between Christian ambivalence and the law from the late Middle Ages to the period of emancipation. I begin my discussion by exploring how theological arguments about Jewish inferiority and difference entered both canon law and secular laws during the late medieval period, turning Christian supersessionism into Christian domination in the sociolegal realm. I also consider the increasing racialisation of Jewish difference through the purity of blood doctrine that solidified boundaries between Jews and Christians in Spain at a time when large numbers of Jews had converted to Christianity. Focusing on the crucial period of Jewish emancipation, I then trace how Christian ambivalence further seeped into the secular legal imagination, shaping ideas about what constitutes a proper ‘religion’ in the modern secular nation state. Throughout this chapter, I explore some of the shifting dynamics of conversion and assimilation and their intersections with the racialisation of Jewish difference, which cast doubt on the possibility of Jewish equality.

By way of conclusion, this final chapter briefly discusses the Flemish ban on religious slaughter without prior stunning, which was confirmed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2020, and restates the main arguments of the book. Moreover, I take the Flemish case to briefly outline three further questions that have emerged from the story this book has told. These questions relate to the relationship between Christian ambivalence and legal progress, the role of Jewish engagements with secular law, and the entanglement of Jewish and Muslim questions in the contemporary politics of religious difference.

Between 1886 and 1889, the renowned mixed vocal ensemble, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, of Tennessee, USA, toured Australia and New Zealand. The Singers’ concerts featured polished arrangements of spirituals, a unique African American form of religious folk song. These performances sparked a conversation about the boundaries of race and the transformative potential of the spiritual for those who embraced the genre within the Australian context. Over the century that followed, often but not always with the support of white missionaries, Indigenous groups employed the songs in various ways: as anthems of emancipation; to stir sympathy among white audiences; as a means of securing space on Australian concert stages and over the air, and to call out the Australian government’s racist policies. Hence, the Fisk Singers’ tour of Australia set into play both performance practices and discourses about the power of Westernising non-European music that fit easily within Australian assimilationist social ideology. Yet tensions would noticeably arise around the mid twentieth century between those who championed spiritual singing as a pathway to assimilation and touring African American recitalists such as Paul Robeson who viewed the cultural value of the songs in starkly different terms.

In and of itself, the category of the bestseller presumes neither literary status nor political consensus. As Ruth Miller Elson remarks, “bestselling books… offer clues to the world view of that mythical creature—the average American.” LGBT bestsellers likewise offer clues about the average queer American—and a perspective on dominant trends and themes in queer culture and consumption since the 1970s. This chapter charts the history of the LGBT bestseller alongside a broader history of LGBT culture in the post-Stonewall era. It traces a shift in popular LGBT literature and publishing from separatism to assimilation, from its roots in the independent gay presses of the 1970s through the peak of the AIDS epidemic to the post-AIDS bestsellers popular with both queer and straight readerships. Texts considered include Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Larry Kramer’s Faggots (1978), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978-2014), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015).

This chapter examines consonants in Slavic languages primarily from a synchronic perspective. I begin by reviewing the consonant inventories. Key properties of the inventories are secondary palatalization, a large inventory of coronal fricatives and affricates, and a voicing contrast in obstruents. The remainder of the chapter reviews four types of consonant patterns: palatalization, voicing, other local alternations, and long-distance alternations. Palatalization is inherited from Proto-Slavic, but the contemporary languages differ in terms of segments undergoing it, morphological triggers, and phonological conditioning. Slavic voicing alternations offer typological insight into the extent of cross-linguistic variation. The key differences are in final devoicing, directionality, and participation of sonorants. Slavic languages also exhibit limited place assimilation, dissimilation, and consonant decomposition. As for long-distance patterns, I review both assimilatory (sibilant consonant harmony) and dissimilatory (consonant co-occurrence restrictions) phenomena in two Slavic languages.

We investigate acoustic correlates of the laryngeal contrast in intervocalic stops in three speech communities – homeland Polish speakers and first- and second-generation heritage Polish speakers in Toronto. Using a sample of 1,187 tokens extracted from conversational speech, we show that the employment of some parameters signaling laryngeal contrast differs between the homeland and heritage speakers. Some parameters are suppressed (i.e., closure phonation and duration) and some are amplified (i.e., vowel and release duration). We interpret these processes in light of proposals by Flege and Bohn (2021) and Polinsky (2018) regarding contact-induced interaction (i.e., assimilation versus dissimilation between languages). We propose that the interaction between systems occurs at a low level of granularity, that is, at the level of individual phonetic properties of a single phoneme.

This chapter recovers the voices of marginalised US communities – Native, Jewish, and African Americans – bringing out of oblivion their Tercentenary contributions. It asks whether underprivileged racial and ethnic groups accepted the alleged superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cultural heritage, and whether, by appropriating Shakespeare, they attempted to become part of that heritage or to challenge its exclusivity. It demonstrates that 1916 America was torn between competing impulses of assimilation and diversity. The white majority held out ostensibly universal cultural standards to which all should aspire, while believing that they were unattainable to some groups. The minorities faced the irreconcilable demands of trying to conform to these standards at the cost of renouncing their distinct identity, while sensing that white supremacists would never accept them as equal no matter what they did. The Tercentenary celebrations registered these tensions and allowed the members of American minorities to produce hybrid Shakespearean appropriations, which accommodated a far-reaching critique of dominant ideology. They helped them to express their distinctive identities, while highlighting the entrenched inequality that they endured.

This chapter examines the politics of American immigrant fiction in the twentieth century, a time period that saw three large waves of immigration. The first took place between 1880 and 1924 and consisted primarily of European immigrants and Asian immigrants. The second wave ranged from 1924 to 1965 and was much smaller than the first, largely due to shifting political views toward immigrants which resulted in legislation that significantly restricted the flow of newcomers. The third wave was triggered in 1965 by another change in both national attitude and policy and it lasted into the early decades of the twentieth century. During this time, the immigrant novel reflected political realities through its portrayal of how migration to the United States brought success for some and marginalization for others. The genre confronted the myth that all newcomers enjoy equal potential to achieve the “American Dream” by exposing how racialization, the process of assigning individuals to categories based on characteristics such as skin color or facial features, significantly determined inclusion or exclusion.

Informal borrowings can be classified according to several criteria. As for the typology by borrowed material, one can distinguish loanwords, which are the most frequent in the database, followed by other types, including loanblends and loan translations. As for typology by part of speech, the majority are nouns, followed by adjectives and verbs, which is consistent with the part-of-speech distribution patterns found in noninformal borrowings; however, there are a few surprises. As for assimilation, one can distinguish partially assimilated borrowings, which are most frequent, followed by fully assimilated and unassimilated expressions. As for modification, unmodified borrowings are the most frequent, followed by partly modified and highly modified ones. There are many more criteria proposed in the text.

Chapter 1 introduces the pattern of /str/-retraction and then lays the theoretical groundworkfor the variationist approach to this sound change. The chapter first defines language variation and change and then provides an overview of research paradigms in interspeaker and intraspeaker variation. These approaches are completed with a section on meaning in language.

This chapter serves the purpose of introducing readers both to the paradigms and theoretical expectations in language change research as well as providing the foundation for the types and the nature of language-external variables that will later find their way into the methods and the statistical models developed.

Chapter 2 explains the phonetic and phonological background of sibilant analysis.It first establishes a definition of the phoneme and then continues to describe the sounds involved based on an articulatory point of view. These are then connected to acoustic theories of speech production that illustrate how prototypical articulatory gestures create the resulting sound waves that are perceived as phonemes. It specifically explains how source filter theory and turbulence are important to the production of sibilants. It then illustrates how the acoustic output created can be quantified and classified based on characteristics such as spectral mean, skewness, and kurtosis of the speech signal.

The chapter then moves on to suprasegmental theories and fundamentals of /str/-retraction research. It explains how exemplar models of the mental lexicon are suitable to describe the sound change at hand. It then briefly illustrates the uniqueness of triple-consonant clusters in English. As important processes in this sound change, coarticulation and assimilation are then differentiated.