This chapter provides a snapshot of Rwanda’s evolving political settlement and economic development trajectory. The chapter begins by highlighting significant structural vulnerabilities that shaped Rwanda’s domestic politics historically, including ethnicity-based inequalities and political contestation, historical divisions associated with the royal family and aristocracy, refugee issues, inadequate employment opportunities and regional inequalities. It then highlights the rapid growth that took place in Rwanda over the last three decades, which has also been accompanied by significant export diversification. It then provides a brief political settlement analysis of present-day Rwanda, highlighting how development is being contested transnationally, pointing to the key vulnerabilities characterising its hub-based strategy. In particular, it describes how increased elite vulnerability has meant that the government has been reluctant to support domestic capital. As a result, the Rwandan government has failed to develop effective state–business relations aimed at achieving structural transformation.

The book is motivated by the question of analysing how Rwanda’s development trajectory can contribute to our understanding of why structural transformation remains so elusive. This chapter introduces the central contributions of the book. First, the book employs structuralist political settlements analysis to highlight how contemporary late development is contested transnationally, prompting the need for analysis across different scales. Second, the book describes how African growth has been largely driven by the services sector and Rwanda is emblematic of contemporary African growth experiences, especially since, like elsewhere on the continent, structural transformation has remained elusive. Third, the book contributes to existing literature on Rwanda by highlighting that the Rwandan Patriotic Front prioritised services-based strategies partly to reduce its reliance on domestic businesspeople because of the elite vulnerability that has characterised its rule. This strategy has yielded growth and export diversification without achieving structural transformation because elite vulnerability has inhibited effective state–business relations. The introduction also includes a discussion of the methodology employed in the book and the structure of the chapters that follow.

The 104-year-long Rana regime (1846–1951) prevented writers from writing for lay people, let alone the voices of the marginalized or janajatis, Indigenous people in this context. Writing remained a practice in praise of the Rana regime or the people in power. Literature became the genre belonging to societal elites. Social change through writing became a far cry from reality. Playfulness and freshness in writing – which could be obtained through the voices of the marginalized or through the projection of human relationships and their interactive minds – remained a distant shore. Krishna Lal Subba was imprisoned for nine years for writing a book, Makaiko Kheti (1920), meaning the cultivation of maize (Pandey 2012). Writing was fully censored. It would be a dangerous matter to attempt to write in a regime that did not want the lay people becoming aware and educated, and they always remained as “others” or marginalized. Freedom of literary expression was strictly limited by the Rana government (Hutt 1990). If anyone published a book without the Gorkha Language Publication Committee's approval, the publisher would be fined 50 Nepali rupees, and they would be punished if the book did not meet the Committee's guidelines (Acharya 2022).

However, toward the end of the Rana regime, “some writers had started rejecting the classical conventions of the older tradition, others adapted traditional genres and styles to express new concerns” (Hutt 1990: 5). Laxmi Prasad Devkota's “Muna Madan” (1936) has remained immensely popular over the years, establishing itself as a cornerstone of Nepali literature. It transcends genres, becoming a literary and jhyaure masterpiece, deeply resonating with the masses. Despite its widespread appeal, the content candidly delves into the lives of marginalized communities, shedding light on the “other” and offering a vivid portrayal of society and sociocultural milieu during that era.

This chapter considers how the mainstream success of contemporary African American poets recalls the concerns about public pressure to conform at the expense of expressing Black cultural heritage in verse that Langston Hughes explained well in his 1926 essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." Using interviews with the poets and analysis of their poems, the chapter traces the ambivalent reception these poets have perceived and articulates the senses of heritage and innovation by which they maintain their integrity. It concludes that, while Hughes’s concerns remain relevant, contemporary African American poets in the national spotlight have achieved their prominence through a well-earned confidence.

The topic of chapter 6 is unequal representation with particular emphasis on intersecting identities, voice and agency. The chapter digs deeper into the issue of policy priorities with a view to uncover who — and to some extent also what issues — female parliamentarians in the region represent as well as the reasoning behind their choices, not based on voting patterns as has traditionally been the case in such analyses, but anchored in personal narratives. The chapter accordingly explores the quality of representation (symbolic, descriptive and substantive) and helps us gain an understanding of which women and policy areas are represented, and which are underrepresented in politics at the national level, something which has very significant implications for not only climate change mitigation, but also adaptation and impacts. As the analysis progresses, it becomes clear that the female parliamentarians in the MENA tend to represent ‘people like me’, a reality which poses a serious problem for the quality of women’s representation, because the majority of women are simply not represented in earnest.

Early modern European imperialism in the Americas is distinctive in the broader history of empires in its fusion of economic interests and geopolitical rivalries with religious objectives and rationales, despite sectarian divides. Taking a comparative hemispheric perspective, this chapter provides an overview of the imperial contexts in which colonial literatures emerged in the Spanish, Portuguese, British, and French empires in the Americas and describes the development of the various colonial literary and generic landscapes in these realms in terms of their diverse modes of economic exploitation and political domination within an emergent global capitalist system.

This chapter defines the key techniques of African American poetry invested in digital technology and internet community as "remix" and "sampling," and traces how these techniques derive from a pursuit of liberation that, it argues, has been at the heart of the African American poetic tradition since the first enslaved poets wrote. It identifes how Black digital poetics continues to challenges dominant narratives that diminish the Black body as commodity in the service of nationalist and colonizing practices. It demonstrates how digital poetics uses its techniques to imagine non-hierarchical ways of being and knowing.

This chapter outlines the more than century-long impact of the Left on African American poetry and vice versa from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Bolshevik Revolution in the early twentieth century to Black Lives Matter in the early twenty-first. This is an exchange with deep formal and thematic consequences for the development of Black poetry and a crucial mode for the circulation of Black Left ideas, practices, concerns, tropes, and so on, in US society, marking US politics and culture, and, to a significant degree, keeping the Left alive in the contemporary moment when the Left is more a sensibility and culture inspiring relatively loose and ephemeral association rather than consisting of stable and coherent parties and internationals.

As a country situated in the Himalayan belt, Nepal is prone to various natural disasters, from earthquakes and landslides to floods and famines. For Sabrina Regmi, who works on gender and disaster in rural Nepal, it is the unique topography of the country that makes it prone to disasters like landslides in the mountainous areas, floods in the lowlands, and earthquakes in the hills (Regmi 2016: 224). Indeed, who can forget the massive earthquake in 2015 that alarmed and alerted the world to the dangers of inhabiting this Himalayan zone. If these natural disasters that have led to Nepal being ranked 20th in the highly disasterprone zones of the world (Khanal 2020: 7) were not enough, then the country has had to contend with various man-made disasters in the form of the Maoist civil war that lasted for nearly a decade (1996–2006). Therefore, it is no surprise if disaster emerges as a major theme in contemporary fiction from Nepal, be it in Nepali or the English language. Nepali writers such as Maheshbikram Shah, winner of the Madan Puraskar, the highest literary honor in Nepal, and journalist, filmmaker, and writer Sushma Joshi, in her debut collection of English-language short stories, depict various natural and man-made disasters plaguing Nepali society. Sushma Joshi's English-language collection of short stories titled The End of the World (2008) contains stories about the plight of the urban poor within the city of Kathmandu. Maheshbikram Shah's collection titled Chapamar ko Choro (2006), which translates as “The Guerrilla's Son,” depicts narratives about the plight of ordinary people in rural Nepal, drawn from Shah's own experience of working as a police officer within the Nepali state. These short stories by Shah and Joshi depict different kinds of disasters, from floods, famines, and imagined apocalypse to war, while placing women at the center of these disintegrating worlds. This chapter aims to understand what placing women as central protagonists within a rapidly disintegrating world means.

Revolutionary theories were paradigms for transforming future modes of production, social relation, and cultural representation, and for assessing past and existing relations of inequality and unfreedom. In this light, revolutionary theory was its own form of speculative fiction. Contemporary speculative fiction and film by Indigenous and Latinx creatives is a continuation of this revolutionary theorizing. If 20th-century revolutionary movements “failed” Latin American, Latinx, and Indigenous subalterns, then speculative fiction responds to this failure with a 21st-century anti-colonial/decolonial hermeneutic for understanding social relations of power as legacies of colonialism, while the aesthetic conventions of speculative fiction reanimate the genre as a vision of future worlds. Latinx and Indigenous authors and directors of science fiction, neo-gothic, adventure and dystopic/utopic genres explore the legacies of colonialism, neocolonialism, dispossession, and extractivism by creating shared public visions for their audiences of these events, as well as visions of future worlds yet to come.

This chapter implicitly responds to other chapters’ examination of imperial ideologies of time as well as their insistence on alternative temporalities. It does so by addressing the meanings and lived experiences of empire and its waves of apocalypse from the point of view of early Native literary studies and contemporary Native literary studies. In this chapter, literary categories open up history and demand that we see and think about periodization itself. Through a brief survey of early and contemporary texts, the chapter introduces readers to early (North American) Native studies and contemporary US Native literary studies, showing how both these overlapping bodies of literature helps us to see and better understand empire and ongoing imperial formations.

This chapter characterizes the five central themes that emerged from and unite the contributions to this book. It clarifies how the contributors characterized a defining conundrum of Black poetry, traces its intellectual interventions and its communal sensibilites, identifies its innovative origins and emphasis on syncretism, and captures its artistic beauties. And it clarifies how the contributors characterize the growing influence of African American poets in determining the terms of literary value in US literary culture. It verifies the expertise by which these essays validate African American poetry as a distincitve tradition and as an aspect of a US national tradition which it both critiques and enhances.