In this chapter, I explore historical phenomena across a century of African American poetry, mapping a series of trends through which Black vernacular music and language come together in distinct poetic modes. Within this tradition, poets have consistently innovated the genre by incorporating culturally specific forms and expressive practices from the Black vernacular. While this conflation of music and writing has led to much innovation, it also carries immense political significance, by challenging the hegemony of Western aesthetic criteria and recording Black experience and cultural knowledge against racism’s denigrations or erasures. In this multiform articulation of Black subjectivity across time, African American poets have continually affirmed the importance of music as a cultural repository and a model for alternative poetics.

Chapter 4 is the first of the four analytical chapters anchored in the qualitative interviews, and focuses on the topic of women’s representation in the MENA at the national level. The chapter presents an overview of women in parliament from independence to the present day, covering the right to vote and stand for office as well as the number of female parliamentarians per country following the most recent elections. The analysis then moves onto barriers to women’s representation, beginning with the pre-nomination stage and the role of factors such as patriarchy and violence against women. The subsequent sections detail different paths to parliament in the pre- and post-Uprisings eras. Among the topics covered are internal party culture and electoral rules, as well as the background characteristics of the women who make it in politics. The final part of chapter 4 is dedicated to the factors behind success at the campaign stage and once in office with particular reference to the importance of extra-party networks, access to finances and qualifications, as well as the issues of discrimination and self-discrimination at the time of portfolio allocation.

Chapter 7 begins with a discussion of how colonialism and the climate issue in the MENA are strongly linked, and how this relationship affects not only development trajectories, but also the status of the climate as a policy area and women’s representation. The second part of the chapter covers Othering, that is, the portrayal of women as vulnerable victims or saviours, focusing on the dangers of feminizing vulnerability and responsibility, whilst also showcasing how Othering of women in the Global South occurs among female parliamentarians in the MENA. In terms of the global climate crisis, this has led to a situation where the climate issue is not prioritized as much as it could be if the female parliamentarians were more accountable to the electorate and identified more strongly with a broader group of women, that is, beyond the narrow elite segment of the population from which they themselves were recruited. At present, those that are the most passionate about combatting the climate crisis are the youth, whereas those who stand to gain the most are marginalized women — two groups that are nothing like the female parliamentarians, who are supposed to act in their interest.

In order to characterize how African American poets enacted a version of the avant-garde, this chapter connects the formation of Black writers’ collectives in the 1980s and 1990s to the original theories of the avant-garde in which artistic dissent was tied to social withdrawal and political dissent. It identifies how the Dark Room Collective of the 1980s and early 1990s and the Black Took Collective of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century used their bohemian withdrawal to cultivate innovative artistic practices that led, paradoxically, to mainstream success. Since that success defies racial disparagement in ways analogous to how the collective withdrawal did, this chapter posits that "success" as an "avant-garde thing," an ambivalent extension of avant-garde dissent.

Background

Madhesh, a region rich in culture and history and the heartland of the ancient Mithila kingdom, is celebrated as the birthplace of revered figures such as Sita and Gargi, women who embody wisdom, power, and empowerment. As daughters of Mithila, their legacy should have been one of empowerment for all Madheshi women, fostering a sense of strength and agency among those residing in their homeland. Yet, contrary to this legacy, Madheshi women today find themselves marginalized in their own land, treated as outsiders both by their own patriarchal society and by the nationalist discourse of the Nepali state, which views Madhesh as a peripheral and contested space. This dual marginalization places Madheshi women in a complex state of “otherness,” where they are not only excluded from the mainstream narratives of Nepali identity but also subjected to restrictive patriarchal norms within their own community (Gautam 2008; Ghimire 2018). To understand this paradox, we must delve into the forces that have conspired to marginalize these women and examine why the legacy of empowerment has not been passed down to the women of Mithila, that is, “Madhesh.”

In the sociopolitical landscape of Nepal, Madheshi women endure a unique form of intersectional oppression that intertwines gender-based and ethnic discrimination. They face the multidimensional nature of marginalization that includes patriarchal constraints within their community and systemic exclusion from the broader nationalist discourse. As a result, Madheshi women find themselves “doubly othered,” experiencing dual layers of discrimination that render their struggles distinct within Nepal's feminist and social justice movements.

The last chapter contrasts separation and integration at the highest ends of oppositional self-other hierarchization. The focus is on formal representations of Iran’s religious state authority (whether through marjaʿiyat or rahbari) and non-Iranian lay organizations with transsectarian tendencies supporting the Islamic Republic. The former (e.g., the Islamic Centre of England in London and the Imam Ali Centres of Hamburg and Vienna) have moderated abrasive expressions of oppositional hierarchy while the latter (e.g., Siddiqui’s London-founded Muslim Parliament and the ‘Kaplan Gemeinde’ in Cologne) thrived publicly on unapologetic Islamic supremacism. Only a trace remains of the transsectarian current of Muslim segregation in Europe, whereas Shiʿism’s state-bound, sectarian institutionalization has flourished — even while overtly ecumenist and opposed to self-isolation. Its treatment is prefaced by a reading of multicultural secularism as seeking assimilation in reverse. Among the cases of institutionalization is Germany’s national Shiʿite representation, the IGS Gemeinschaft, which is led by Khomeinists who also advocate Muslims’ European integration. Some entryist strategies are documented around regimist integration discourse serving the Shiʿite indigenisation of Europe, which are increasingly recognized and countered by European (supra-)state institutions. The text ends on a counterpoint with the exceptional case of Ayatollah Qāʾem-Maqāmi, a regime representative who also developed a ‘theology of integration’ inviting Muslims to engage positively with Europe as it is.

Background

Bala Krishna Sama (1902–1981), the doyen of Nepali drama, wrote an epic entitled Chiso Chulho (1958), or “cold hearth.” This epic is woven around the theme of a silent but very strong love relationship between Gauri, a so-called high caste girl, and Sante, a Dalit young man. Sama has chosen to write an epic on the theme of inter-caste love, which was not accepted by the traditional Nepali society. In this epic Sama has dramatized the moments and conditions of alterity. Sama chooses the epic genre to write about othering in a caste-ridden society that he experienced and inherited because this genre gives him space to play at once with tradition and individuality. Sama has chosen to describe the agony of the characters by giving them poetic elevation, thereby deconstructing the canonical norm, which requires that the hero of the epic should be one who hails from the upper echelon or caste of society. By selecting a Dalit or the so-called low-caste male character named Sante, who tailors clothes as part of his traditional occupation, Sama has used all the accoutrements of the epic genre in this oeuvre.

Sante's love for the higher-caste woman Gauri has introduced an unsolved theme that reverberates even in today's Nepali society, which claims to have made achievements in terms of eliminating the excesses of casteism and improving the conditions of women. We can imagine what would have happened if Gauri and Sante had taken a rebellious stand nearly seven decades ago. As a reminder, we can take the widely reported and discussed tragic incident resulting in the death of several young men of Rukum Karnali that happened on May 20, 2020, perpetrated to foil the love between a high-caste girl and a Dalit boy.

The title of this volume, The Other Nepal, implies that there exists a more visible, globally recognizable, widely represented, and geopolitically marked entity called “Nepal” to which the other Nepal merely plays a shadowy, sketchy, and spectral sidekick that is routinely overlooked, forgotten, and silenced. The origin of this internal schism may be traced to an ideologically fraught and rancorous debate between two camps of Nepalese historians and philologists over the denotation of the letter “ने” (Ne) in the word “Nepal.” Hindu historians of Nepal see in it an ancient Hindu sage named “Ne” and claim that he is the protector (palak) of the land. Those opposed to this anthropomorphizing and Sanskritization assert that “Nepal” derives from the Tibeto-Burman words nhyet, meaning cattle, and pa, meaning man, and claim that this non-Hindu and zoomorphic signification has gradually been displaced and erased from Nepali history, languages, and cultures. This erasure in their eyes represents and embodies a larger and more sinister pattern of internal colonization of Indigenous and ethnic populations and cultures of Nepal.

This book carries tentative inscriptions of this eclipsed, erased, internally colonized, and othered Nepal. It intends to probe into the apparent dyad between the Nepal that arrogates to itself the role of defining and representing the entire nation and the Nepal that is effectively silenced by the hegemonic discourses and practices of nationalism and by the hierarchies premised on caste, ethnicity, and gender. The tenor of the analysis and research collected in this book, therefore, is at once investigative, critical, inclusive, and ethical. To inquire into and bring to light what has hitherto been largely invisible and to investigate the causes, conditions, and consequences of such invisibility are the primary goals of this volume.

The two excerpts cited above are just two examples among many instances where civil liberties activists have identified and positioned themselves as concerned citizens. For more than four decades, a segment of middleclass activists in India has adopted this self-identification, which is an important aspect of the ongoing normative contestation surrounding the notion of good citizenship. Despite its significance, the history, specificity and practice of this self-identification remain underexplored. This chapter examines concerned citizenship as an urban, middle-class, civil-societybased form of allyship, which has facilitated a distinct mode of collective action within the Indian socio-political landscape.

On February 24, 2021, two Newar activists, Suman Sayami and Birochan Shrestha, found themselves behind bars for speaking their native language. As representatives of an advocacy group for the victims of the city's road expansion project, they had visited the police station to meet six protestors who had been arrested earlier that day at the construction site of a major highway exit at Bajalu, Kathmandu. These protestors were part of a group of locals who were demonstrating against the city for unfairly appropriating their land and demolishing their homes for road expansion. At the police station, Suman and Birochan spoke with the jailed activists in Nepalbhasa, a language the police officers did not understand. When the police told them to speak in Nepali, they refused to comply, and they too were taken into custody (Deśasancāra 2021).

Although they were all released by the Supreme Court's order the following week, the incident ignited a wave of outrage and protests across the city. In the days following their arrest, protestors gathered at Indrachowk in Kathmandu, holding placards and chanting slogans declaiming language rights, land rights, Newar unity, and justice for the victims of the state's land encroachment (AawaajNews 2021). This incident was a reminder that language is a crucial aspect of power dynamics, especially in the context of a multilingual nation like Nepal where language hierarchies have shaped unequal access to social, economic, and political power. As Nepali is widely recognized as the official language of the country, the police officers saw Nepalbhasa as a threat to their authority and sought to silence it. This rendered the act of speaking in the language – especially in institutional spaces like the police station – an affront to authority and, thus, a political act.

Suyogbir and Sakambari, though they look well-matched, are worlds apart. Shirishko Phool (translated as Blue Mimosa), a critically acclaimed novel by Bishnu Kumari Waiba (1937–1993), who went by her literary sobriquet “Parijat,” revolves around a one-sided love entanglement between two characters with radically different personalities. Suyogbir, an ex-Gurkha1 in his mid-forties, falls in love with Sakambari, an alpha female half his age. He is a deeply troubled womanizing hedonist full of self-doubt. Sakambari, on the other hand, is a young, strong-willed rebel in her mid-twenties. She is the antithesis of a cliched Nepali woman – she is assertive, smokes a lot, has short hair, and is sharp-tongued – in short, a woman without the normative feminine grace. Although Sakambari is out of Suyogbir's league, he gets attracted to her. Over time, his feelings toward her evolve into an all-consuming obsession, making him confess his love with a “kiss” that leads to Sakambari's subsequent death.

Within the linearity of this deceptively simple unrequited love, Shrishko Phool weaves a complex tapestry of passion and desire, and questions on the twisted realities of life. The text has been able to garner mixed critiques – praised as a compelling text providing an astute observation on the absurdities typical of modern life and criticized as a depressing text lacking originality with heavy Western influence. Nevertheless, the novel has established itself as an existentialist classic in the Nepali canon.

This chapter identifies the intersection between the role of hip-hop music in literary poetry and the operation of poetics in rap by chronicling the parallel histories of the music and the poetic practices developed alongside and in response to it. It traces the emergence of rap from party music, identifies what constitutes poetics in the lyrics and the construction of the music, and clarifies how the music and literary poetry overlap in spoken word, in slam poetics, in TV shows like Def Poetry Jam, and in emerging academic programs and centers.

The third chapter treats the geography of collective Shiʿite self and other and the question of its global contexts. It reassesses ʿĀshurā ritual to trans-European backgrounds of Shiʿite blood donation and charts the transnational evolution of the Twelver Khojas. While the first chapter presents it as local civic integration, blood donation is also a global practice supported by high religious authorities. Thus, blood donation involves cultural exchange on religious terms that both incorporates Shiʿites within national contexts of secular diversity and integrates the latter into Shiʿism’s orbit. Among Twelver Khojas, European settlement gave rise to globalized religious identity, political solidarity, or communal organization. Away from the Africa Federation in Britain, the Shia Ithnaʿashari Community of Middlesex broke open the caste mould, lowering the threshold for extramural relations while rebalancing communal self religiously. This involved strengthened transnational Shiʿite solidarity and a predilection for Middle East-centred, anti-Western Islamism. The World Federation of Khoja Shia Ithna-Asheri Muslim Communities emerged post-migration as a Britain-oriented body that evolved into the community’s global agent. Its international relations sectarianized and amplified the Twelver Khojas’ proto-statal functions on a world scale. In sum, the chapter demonstrates European transformations of Shiʿite identity in global religious contexts shaping trans-European selves.