Drawing together the previous chapters’ discussions of feminine respectability, the Conclusion focuses on the tensions young women experience as they attempt to reconcile personal ambition with societal expectations and as they navigate quotidian life in the city alongside the longer-term objectives of ending their single status. The Conclusion reiterates the book’s two arguments, articulating how feminine youthhood is a period shaped by contingencies, which not only render young women vulnerable but also encourage them to contribute to the uncertainties that shape urban life in contemporary Nigeria. While the previous chapters have discussed how dissimulation, illusion, and concealment shape young women’s lives, and the ambiguous attitudes young women have towards these forms of uncertainty, the Conclusion questions when the fake is categorically immoral. Doing so, young women are inserted into a broader discussion of the means of sustaining, as well as the perceived threats to, social reproduction in urban Nigeria.

Chapter 4 further considers how the city informs young women’s means for realising their much hoped-for futures by focusing on how they navigate the social infrastructure that underpins its daily life. Paying particular attention to young women’s friendships with other young women, the chapter details this group’s fears of ‘fake friends’ and the anxieties they have towards those close to them having the potential to cause them (and their futures) harm. As the ethnography shows, mobile phone communication has afforded young women new styles of communication that allow them to overcome the fears of social intimacy, helping them to stay connected with others while maintaining social distance. Enabling young women to remain visible in urban life from the confines of their homes, and to engage in conversation without revealing personal information, mobile phones provide young women with an alternative social life, re-ordering their experiences of the city while enabling them to remain embedded within the social relationships that sustain it.

The services sector has been the centrepiece of Rwanda’s development strategy since 2000. This chapter describes the evolution of the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s (RPF) goals of transforming its landlocked disadvantages into an opportunity through becoming land-linked. In particular, the goal involves Rwanda becoming a regional hub for transport, tourism, sports and finance. The chapter begins by providing a critical overview of services-based strategies, highlighting their merits and limitations. It then describes the contradictory tensions emerging within Rwanda’s services-based strategy, particularly because the progressive image the RPF attempts to portray is often at odds with domestic realities. The evolution of Rwanda’s tourism strategy is discussed, which focuses on attracting high-end tourists and transforming Kigali into a hub for transport, high-profile events and conferences. The chapter describes how services strategies have evolved in line with Rwanda’s political settlement: at first, providing opportunities to private Rwandan capitalists but then gradually relying on foreign investors and government-affiliated investors. The chapter highlights that Rwanda’s strategy failed to prioritise linkages, which is a result of the elite vulnerability shaping domestic state–business relationships.

This chapter explores the role of poetics in theorizing blackness. That is, if the question of being is an abiding issue in black studies and if that question figures through discourses about black writing, how does poetics contribute to this study? Rather than engage blackness as a content in poems, the chapter considers poetry as an intervention in language. This attentiveness to language characterizes a kind of thinking that is manifest in poetics and that generates possibilities for engaging the philosophical relationship between expressiveness and blackness.

This chapter locates Claudia Rankine’s highly celebrated book Citizen in a lineage of African American artists participating in a similar mode of renovation, which is the production of distinctive kinds of poetry based on linking past artistry and heritage to forward-facing experimentation. It challenges how Citizen was treated as exceptional by the press and prize committees that celebrated it when in fact Rankine herself carefully put her poems and essays in conversation with a number of predecessors, including Richard Wright and Zora Neal Hurston, and with such contemporaries as Nikky Finney, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen. It then connects Rankine to the younger writers Morgan Parker and Aurielle Marie, who, like Rankine and visual artist Glenn Ligon, adapted Hurston’s well-known essay "How It Feel to Be Colored Me" to new purposes. Lineage and innovation united with a heritage of renovation make Citizen outstanding and deserving of its accolades but not unique so much as an extension of innovative African American literary practice.

This chapter introduces the ‘structuralist’ form of political settlements analysis employed in this book. The political settlements framework, initially developed by Mushtaq Khan, has gained increasing popularity but has evolved in very different directions. Political settlements analysis (PSA) was appealing to scholars because it encouraged analysis of power relations shaping development policy, highlighting how distributions of power among organised groups shaped how institutions operated. Influential donor-funded research programmes have aligned it more with neoclassical economics, and this has led to the obfuscation of the structuralist and historical materialist roots of the framework. This chapter elaborates the structuralist and historical materialist roots of political settlements analysis. It highlights the differences between non-structuralist and structuralist approaches to political settlements analysis in relation to the concept of holding power and its components: economic structure, rents, ideas and ideology, and violence and conflict. The chapter highlights how PSA can be used to help understand the contemporary transnational nature of vulnerabilities shaping late-development challenges.

This chapter describes Rwanda’s record within the manufacturing sector. Until recently, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) did not prioritise manufacturing-based growth because of the high transport costs associated with its landlocked geographical position. While there has been some attempt at refocusing on industrial policy since 2015, because of a rising trade deficit and the urgent need to create employment, there has not been substantial progress. Rwanda has not achieved significant advances in increasing industrial employment, production and exports. After presenting the evolution of Rwanda’s industrial policy, the chapter provides detailed examples of three sectors: apparels (textiles and garments), construction materials and pharmaceuticals. In line with dynamics in other sectors, domestic capital has been marginalised in favour of supporting RPF-affiliated firms or relying on foreign investors. Some foreign investors like Volkswagen and BioNTech have invested in Rwanda with much fanfare, but most success has been driven by RPF-affiliated firms. Rwanda’s hopes for structural transformation fall at a key domestic hurdle: building effective state–business relationships aimed at technological capability acquisition for latecomer firms.

This chapter conceives of Black Lives Matter-era poetry of mourning as forms of elegiac activism through which contemporary Black poets, including Lauren Alleyne, Mahogany Browne, Sequoia Maner, darlene anita scott, Nate Marshall, and Jericho Brown, achieve interconnected aims of refusing the naturalization of police and vigilante murders while making legible the ecology of US racism and of opening up a space to affirm Black being – or what Kevin Quashie terms “Black aliveness” – so that they participate in the antiracist struggle without being defined solely by it. Examining the work of poets who have been part of artistic resistance via #Blackpoetsspeakout videos as well as that of those who are better known for their published collections, this chapter also shows the diverse range of available forms and modes Black poets avail themselves of as they engage in elegiac activism and the Black world-building that it entails. Ultimately, this chapter emphasizes the durability of poetry in general and elegy in particular as intergenerational vehicles that link the poets and racial-justice movements of decades past to the pressing concerns of the present as well as to Black futures.

This chapter examines the representation of militarized modernity in American literature through three Korean immigrant writers: Richard E. Kim, Ty Pak, and Henz Insu Fenkl. Initially developed to explain anticommunist statecraft and gendered citizenship in South Korea during its military regimes, militarized modernity proves a productive term for exploring the culture of the migratory circuit between South Korea and the United States. By reading Korean immigrant writers through the lens of militarized modernity, the chapter goes against the critical tendency to view militarized modernity as exclusive to countries in the developing world. Instead, it argues that Korean immigrant writings show militarized modernity as already a part of American literature by foregrounding the traces of their own context of production that register both US imperialism and the ambiguous, changing status of South Korea from occupied country to ally, and finally, to sub-empire.

Phillis Wheatley Peters’s America was both a place and an idea, a reality and an aspiration. Through her writings she transformed herself from being a victim in the actual America into a voice for the America she envisioned. Wheatley Peters’ works should be considered diachronically, recognizing the significance of when she wrote what and to whom, rather than synchronically, as if her positions were unchanging over time. Anyone who attempts to identify her political beliefs must consider how free she was to express them, as well as whether the voice we hear is that of the author, rather than that of a persona she has created. Her image of America evolved radically during the 1770s, as did her vision of her place and role in it. The many ways in which Wheatley Peters subtly and indirectly confronted the issues of racism, sexism, and slavery are increasingly appreciated. Her ambition to be recognized as America’s unofficial poet laureate should be undisputed. Considered a remarkable curiosity during her lifetime, Wheatley Peters is now recognized as a major historical, literary, and political figure, whose significance transcends her ethnic, gender, and national identities.