Souls intact: The soul performances of Audre Lorde,Aretha Franklin,and Nina Simone

This article redefines and regenders the meaning of soul in black expressive culture. The author argues that by the late 1960s the term encodes a narrative whereby racialized struggle yields a culturally superior style, and it shows how black women artists use literary and musical techniques to perform this recuperative alchemy. Reading Audre Lorde’s 1982 biomythography Zami as a paradigmatic soul text, the author contends that this text invites us to deprioritize concerns about the commodification of soul and to show instead how precisely black women artists such as Lorde, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin draw energy from the movement of the spiritual into the secular to create virtuosic, inclusive, and transformative forms of survivorship; the article suggests that they do so by weaving many genres together to create a home out of no home in the body, on the page, and on the stage. This analysis challenges interpretations of soul that privilege its marketization and appropriation and that reproduce a masculinist, heteronormative account, either as “fact,” in histories of popular music, or as the grounds for critique, in recent scholarship on “post-soul aesthetics.”     

Soldiers of Faith behind the Lines: religious women and community patriotism during the First World War in France

On the eve of World War I, considerable tensions existed among French Catholics, Protestants, and Jews and between Catholics and the French state. The crisis provoked by the First World War allowed these faith groups to prove their worth to France through adherence to the Union sacrée. The wartime activities of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish women became important symbols of each faith community's solidarity with France. The war made women representatives of their communities' devotion to France. Religious communities' portrayal of their women's wartime work illuminates the divergent goals for the Union sacrée among different faith communities.     

Agenda-Setting in Greenpeace and Amnesty: The Limits of Centralisation in International NGOs

While international nongovernmental organisations (INGOs) have been heavily studied for their role in transnational advocacy, most research has ignored their internal organisation and the relationships between international and grassroots offices. Intuition suggests that INGOs should face structural imperatives to balance maintaining global brands while simultaneously mobilising disparate publics in local contexts. However, this intuition has not yet been systematically studied. We address this with a paired comparison of Amnesty International and Greenpeace. Using case studies and an original dataset of website attributes, we show that campaigns promoted by international offices and their national counterparts reflect a balance between local diversity and global unity, revealing organisational structures that combine centralised agenda-setting with decentralised agenda implementation. Our research identifies a “measurement gap” with implications for understanding INGO accountability and effectiveness, and indicates that a more complete research programme on INGOs must include attention to internal organisation and structural diversity.