This chapter analyses the political economy of Rwanda’s financial sector. It presents the evolution of Rwanda’s national banking sector and the ways the Rwandan Patriotic Front has sought to mobilise domestic resources to invest in strategic sectors. It provides an overview of how African financial sectors have been transformed in varied ways through adapting to three kinds of financial sector reforms: policies influenced by the market-led consensus, developmentalist strategies and the influence of offshore sectors. Rwanda, in its attempt to transform Kigali into a financial sector while mobilising state-driven investments for strategic investments and adopting ‘best practice’ financial sector reforms, encapsulates the contradictions associated with being influenced by these three sets of policies concurrently. Next, the chapter describes how the Rwandan government has innovatively mobilised domestic resources to fund strategic investments. Innovations include its pension fund, the Rwanda Social Security Board. The chapter concludes by discussing how elite vulnerability has constrained the capacity of the Rwandan government to concentrate resources and financial expertise in one specific financial institution, thereby inhibiting the effectiveness of strategic investments.

Manjushree Thapa's The Tutor of History (2001), set in post-1990s Nepal, portrays characters pursuing romantic and economic desires amid democratic and market reforms. This chapter examines desire, choice, and action in Thapa's novel to explore how democracy challenges traditional power structures and empowers women. Thapa's novel presents a democratic ethos that extends beyond formal institutions to everyday experience. By examining how democratic practices shape the experiences of gendered “others,” I argue that the novel envisions women as active citizens shaping a more equitable society.

The Tutor of History follows an election in a small Nepali town and a courtship between Binita, a widow who runs a teashop while caring for her daughter and cousin, and Rishi, a history teacher and communist activist. The romance links the election campaign with domesticity, connecting democratic practices to private life and public opinion to private desires. The characters hope that democracy's transformative potential will challenge entrenched power structures, empower marginalized women, and foster inclusive development. Desire in the novel erupts from “the gaps in history” that fail to remember marginalized others (Thapa 2001: 57). When Binita and Rishi express their amorous desire for each other, their romantic desire presents them with an opportunity to start a new life that is free from the oppressions brought to a widowed woman by the past, tradition, and orthodoxy. The novel imagines women as full citizens in a democracy where universal suffrage allows them to dream of and choose new ways of living. Desire, choice, and action thus become tools for political and personal transformation. The novel envisions a democracy where individuals can pursue their desires without coercion from the state or institutions tied to gender, caste, and class.

The excerpts mentioned above are part of a debate, which took place in 1984–1985, on the arguable failure of political parties and the emergence of groups referred to as non-party political formations. Defending the emergence of these groups, Sethi argues that the formation of such groups was necessitated because political parties had been ‘side-tracking the issues of direct concern to the people’. In contrast, Karat, on behalf of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]), argued that non-party groups played into an ‘imperialist strategy’ and were anti-left.

Against the backdrop of the existing scholarship on masculinities, this chapter examines iterations of masculinity in South Asian literature, particularly in literature from Nepal. As such, the chapter analyzes Yogesh Raj's 2018 Madan Puraskār winning novel, Rahahār (Defeat at War), and Laxmi Prasad Devkota's poem “Pāgal,” or “Crazy,” published in 1953. The choice of these two literary works is partly subjective, and partly because they not only fit the topic of hegemonic masculinity and its other seamlessly, but there is scant scholarship on these works that is available to a wider audience. Even though Raj's novel revolves around the Kathmandu Valley of the eighteenth century and showcases social and gender dynamics during that time frame, the novel also demonstrates a continuum of masculinity at work, and not just orthodox or primitive masculinity as one would assume given the story's timeline. While the Gorkhali forces of King Prithivi Narayan Shah embody aspects of primitive or orthodox masculinity, King Ranajit Malla of Bhaktapur not only practices heterodox masculinity, but he also comes close to what some critics call “cacodoxy,” that is, an iteration of masculinity that overlaps with elements of femininity. As the ironic title of the novel suggests, King Ranajit practices supple forms of masculinity during his long reign of the Bhaktapur city-state, and, after his defeat at the hands of the Gorkhali, he accepts his position of a defeated king, begging the victor to grant him one last wish, namely to go to Kanshi, the present-day city of Varanasi in India.

The sonnet has been in wide use among African American poets since the late nineteenth century. This chapter traces the African American sonnet from its emergence through the Harlem Renaissance in order to understand the popularity of a form often associated with white European literature. It shows that the sonnet initially was a means for Black writers to get published in the genteel quality magazines which shaped literary and political debates around the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, the sonnet served as a vehicle for community building and as a forum in which foundational questions of Black poetics could be negotiated. Discussing writers from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, the chapter identifies four impulses that guided African American approaches to the sonnet form: the contests over the commemoration of the Civil War; the subversive appropriation of genteel poetic conventions; the self-confident political protest of the Harlem Renaissance; and the quest for a vernacular modernist idiom.

The mid 1960s and early 1970s Black Arts Movement (BAM) was an artistic and cultural renaissance rooted in the desire to mobilize an aesthetic tied to black self-determination. Like the multidirectional flow of this regional, national, and transnational movement (east, west, north, and south), the lines of the poetry were moving in many unexpected directions. BAM poets were committed to representing blackness, but the impulse to represent blackness often became inseparable from the impulse to experiment with new ways of representing blackness. The movement set in motion a deeper understanding of the inseparability of forms of black representation and forms of black experimental space. With a particular focus on the BAM in the South and black women poets who developed a southern Black Power feminist orientation, this chapter examines the subtleties and nuances of the poetics of space that shaped the BAM.

This chapter takes a postcolonial-ecocritical perspective on a particular mode of empire referred to as ecological-agrarian imperialism. It examines aesthetic articulations of colonial agrarianism with a special view to James Fenimore Cooper’s Littlepage trilogy and The Crater, which are read in the context of Indian Removal and the Anti-Rent conflict in the Hudson River area. It argues that Cooper registers a remarkable critical awareness of the historical origins of the sociocultural conjunctions of soil depletion, food scarcity, biodiversity reduction, and colonial capitalism. Cooper’s works can help us think through the interrelated ecological challenges of our own time such as climate change, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss, and to reflect on utopian possibilities and roads not taken when the social and economic foundations of the United States were laid out.

This chapter describes the evolution of agriculture sector policies during the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rule. Most Rwandans still live in rural areas, and agriculture continues to employ most Rwandans. Prior to RPF rule, the Grégoire Kayibanda and Juvénal Habyarimana governments presented their parties as prioritising rural interests, as well as the production of cash crops for export (particularly coffee). However, since the RPF assumed power, policy priorities have shifted to diversifying agriculture exports (including producing higher-value coffee and tea) and encouraging the market-oriented commercialisation of agricultural production. The RPF’s attempts at reorganising rural society has been characterised by rural resistance and increasing inequality. However, there have been some successes, which have been driven by RPF-affiliated firms, sometimes in partnership with philanthropic investors. Successes include upgrading primary commodities and diversifying agricultural exports. However, agrarian policies have also been marked by increased land differentiation and rural inequality. Ultimately, sustained structural transformation is inhibited by elite vulnerability. The chapter highlights that there are few signs of the emergence of leading domestic agrarian capitalists.

Since time immemorial The non-stop river of our life deemed Your statement as truth And we considered ourselves untouchables.

—Amgai (2016), translated by Rabindra Chaulagain and Narayan Pokhrel

Caste System and Practices in Nepal

The Western District Court of Nepal issued a ruling on December 5, 2023, finding 26 individuals guilty of murder and caste-based discrimination (Amnesty International 2023). Out of the 26, 24 received life sentences, while the remaining 2 were sentenced to two years in prison. The tragic incident that led to this verdict occurred on May 23, 2020, when Nawaraj B. K. from Jajarkot district ventured into Rukum district with his companions to bring back his girlfriend as his betrothed. Unfortunately, they were met with hostility from villagers, who hurled stones at them, eventually driving the group of 19 young men to the banks of the Bheri River, where they met a catastrophic fate (Adhikari 2020). Nawaraj, a member of the Dalit community, was in a relationship with Sushma Malla, who was from the so-called higher caste of “Thakuri.” Sushma had invited Nawaraj to her village with the intention of eloping. However, what was meant to be a romantic rendezvous turned into a massacre due to the perceived insult to the honor of the upper-caste family and their neighbors.

Race has been a dominant theme in studies of US black art and politics in the 1910s and 1920s. This chapter shifts focus to imperial concerns during a period marked by US occupations in Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, as well as the acquisition of the Danish Virgin Islands. It explores how the era’s print culture both revealed and obscured the expansion of a US Empire or Greater United States in the Caribbean. US governance in places like Haiti did not go unchallenged in leftist and race-conscious periodicals such as The Nation, The Crisis, and The Crusader. While non-fiction provoked anti-imperial analyses, fiction did not prompt the same responses. Assessing reviews and commentary of fiction, including Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death, this chapter examines why anti-imperial reading proved so elusive in this context.

Melville is one of the canonical writers without whom a literary history of empire could not be imagined. This chapter contextualizes Melville as a continental thinker and, from this comparative perspective, reconsiders his insights on empire with an eye to Spanish imperial history, US empire, British empire, and the overlap among them. The chapter concludes with a turn to José Martí, another intellectual-activist without whom the story of empire in the Americas could not be told.

The Sanskrit-derived word dalit, meaning “broken,” or “ground down,” is the term most commonly used in contemporary South Asian scholarly, political, and literary discourse to denote people belonging to castes that have been discriminated against, oppressed, and exploited by those who rank higher than them in the Hindu caste system. “Dalit” is often referred to as a Marathi word, because it was in that language that it first achieved its political currency, but it is now current in every major South Asian language, including Nepali, and is used to mark the Dalits’ unashamed assertion of their identity and their claims to active political agency.

In Nepal, where they are defined by caste, Dalits number approximately 3.8 million, constituting just over 13 percent of the total population, according to the government's 2021 census. Huge social, political, and legislative changes over the past 60 years have led to improvements in the Dalit life experience.

However, while many individual Dalits have managed to acquire an education and prosper, Dalits overall remain at the very bottom of Nepali society in terms of all key development indicators. They continue to face discrimination, exclusion, and violence, both direct and structural, and efforts to improve their condition are routinely compromised by pervasive social stigma.

Although children have migrated as long as people have, the child migrant story has received increasing attention in the United States since the “child migrant crisis” of 2014. At the same time that child migrants have been thrust into the media spotlight, a growing body of work in migration studies has emphasized necropolitics. As enduring symbols of vitality in literature and culture, children are supposed to be the antithesis of death. Focusing on descriptions of nine-year-old Javiercito/Chepito’s body and language in Javier Zamora’s 2022 memoir Solito, this chapter shows that efforts to contain the unaccompanied child migrant physically, temporally, and linguistically call attention to the necropolitics of migration, undocutime (the slow violence of illegality), and the coloniality of migration in the Americas—in particular, the United States’ expansion of its southern border and the role of youth in its extractive relationship to Latin America.

Now twenty-five years into the twenty-first century, the formidable legacies of Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) come into clear view. She lent her lyrical voice to celebrating the dignity, complexity, and heroism of ordinary people. Her portraits of the residents of Chicago’s South Side, where she lived most of her life, achieve vitality because of her skillful fusion of Black cultural tradition with modernist aesthetics. She saw her poetry chronicling the history of a transforming society in the service of truth and universal humanism. Brooks wanted her poetry “to vivify the universal fact,” and early in her writing career she found that humanism all around her as she looked from the window of her small second-floor apartment at 623 East 63rd Street. This chapter discusses Brooks as the singular inspiration for the inaugural Furious Flower Conference in 1994, her passion for inspiring young people to explore their gifts of writing and reading, her own distinguished career as an award-winning American poet, and her deep devotion to the craft of writing and the inventiveness of language.

The essay considers the relationship of the US empire to torture as a practice and an aspect of entertainment. Focusing on depictions of torture in film and television after 9/11, the article also looks back to the nineteenth century to show how torture functioned as a type of entertainment in an earlier historical context. Lazo argues that the use of torture in popular culture amounts to a type of “torturetainment” meant to entice the audience with its spectacle of violence. Through these forms of torturetainment, US cultural producers recognize, critique and flaunt the US willingness to use torture as a tactic to support its imperial ambitions while also masking the operations of empire through a focus on alternate narratives related to the goals of protagonists. These cultural representations thus reveal torture as part of the arsenal of empire and a discursive framing related to social conditions within a national polis. The chapter examines the film Zero, Dark Thirty (2012) and a dime novel from 1851 to emphasize the longue durée of torture as entertainment within the context of the US empire.

Linking worldview and geographical spaces, this chapter links place, aesthetic development, and ideological changes in the work of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. From the mix of fantasy, sci-fi, bebop, and rhythm & blues of his home town, Newark, through his years in the (largely) white, avant-garde culture of Greenwich Village and his transitional plunge into Harlem’s Cultural Nationalist milieu, to his long final activism as Newark’s pre-eminent Marxist-Leninist poet, Baraka became one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century. Throughout these changes, Baraka’s poetry, with its evolving combination of Black vernacular speech, avant-garde technique, and political acuity, profoundly influenced Black American poetry and, in the process, the nature of contemporary American poetry itself.

In the winter of 1984, large-scale and targeted violence against Sikhs engulfed New Delhi's suburbs such as Sultanpuri, Mangolpuri and Trilokpuri. The country witnessed a massacre that left an indelible scar on its history. Between 3,000 and 17,000 Sikhs were killed, and over 50,000 forced to flee their homes. Amid all this violence and curfew-bound streets, a group of like-minded people—university professors, government officials, doctors, lawyers, students and members of civil society groups—took to the streets carrying nothing more than notepads and pens. They had first gathered at a friend's place, and divided themselves into two teams. One was led by the People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) and the other by the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), both of which were civil liberties groups that had been set up about a decade ago in the early 1970s.

Both teams navigated the violence-prone neighbourhoods, documenting testimonies of the survivors, destruction of gurudwaras and people's allegations against Congress leaders for having orchestrated the carnage. They interviewed victims, police officers, neighbours, army personnel and political leaders. They collected perpetrators’ information, car numbers and locations which had been targeted during the riots. The testimonies they recorded revealed that mobs had precise information on Sikh households across the city and were armed with kerosene and sulphur powder to set fire to those. Instances of complicity by officials were also recorded, including the names of those who looked the other way. This systematic documentation and its release in the form of a report exposed the chilling coordination behind the violence and revealed how massacres often unfold with calculated precision.