These two responses to essentially the same question, that is, what factors led to the emergence of civil liberties activism, represent the contrasting motivations and political contexts behind the setting up of civil liberties groups in India. Simon sees their first appearance as a pressure group to lobby for the release of Naxalite political prisoners in the early 1970s.

This chapter establishes the spirituals as the bedrock of African American poetry to characterize the tradition as inherently innovative from its origins to the present. It challenges the standard claim that African American poetry begins with texts written by enslaved persons reflecting familiarity with canonical British poetry. In this approach, criticism has generally considered African American poetry in dialogue with the mainstream canon, whether emulating or criticizing its values. Privileging written texts in conventional forms has resulted in devaluing poetry reflecting characteristics such as orality, performance, anonymity, and communal collaboration. It also results in wide acceptance of an African American poetry canon that historically has overlooked the innovative nature of this genre from its origins and an ensuing tradition of avant-garde poetry. From this biased perspective, the spirituals have been overlooked as the genesis of African American poetry, even though that is their rightful place. Viewing the spirituals as the true foundation of this tradition implies shifting some assumptions not just about these poems, but about the place and meaning of originality.

The fourth chapter concerns a key institution in Shiʿism’s reproduction, namely its system of higher learning. Two British institutes that long defined the field in Europe are focused on and compared with a flagship German seminary and other, especially Scandinavian cases. Two theoretical trends are contrasted: of ‘integrative blending’ in studies of Islam in Europe and ‘diversity challenge’ in the field of education and citizenship. Each perspective is traced in Shiʿite higher education, where they produce a paradox of local adjustment and foreign frames. Birmingham’s Al-Mahdi Institute and London’s Islamic College are each read for manifestations of ‘European Islam,’ seen in curricula rebalanced with secular topics; diversity engagement perceived as an Islamic challenge; or ambitions for Western contributions to ‘minorities jurisprudence.’ At the same time, the locally particular practice is led by a cultural logic of transnational religious organization. ‘Western’ Shiʿite seminaries are encompassed as their Dumontian ‘contrary’ within organizational hierarchies of ‘Eastern’ religious (state) education. In the continental European seminaries, these facts show in the outsized role of the Qom-based Al-Mustafa University and its emphasis on proselytizing as opposed to the local formation of independent scholars who might help reform Shiʿism.

This chapter investigates how Charles Hérard-Dumesle’s 1824 Voyage dans le Nord de Haïti contributes to early Haitian writers’ production of Haitian sovereignty. Hérard-Dumesle contributes to this larger effort by contesting the imperial genre of natural history that instrumentalized Haitian people and nature. Against the imperial natural histories that justified colonial extractivism, Hérard-Dumesle offers a Haitian mode of natural history that weaves together the real and imagined natural cosmologies of the Taino people, rural Haitian small holders, and Haiti’s postcolonial elite. This expressly political Haitian natural history and the poetic eloquence on which it ran aspired to redress tyranny not only for Haiti but also on a planetary register.

This chapter considers three significant New Negro Renaissance poets: Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Anne Spencer, and analyzes how they discussed themes of racism and gender inequality in their poetry. Although the critics of their day dismissed their poetry as raceless and apolitical, this chapter demonstrates how New Negro women writers utilized the domestic sphere of writing and wrote poetry that allowed them to articulate and explore their unspeakable desires. Black women poets were able to express their wholeness and sexual self-determination. Even though their writings may not have garnered critical acclaim and success, Black women writers were present and actively advancing Black feminist ideas. Extending the analysis of such scholars as Maureen Honey, Cheryl Wall, and Gloria T. Hull, this chapter illustrates that Black women writers fashioned a poetics that enabled them to discuss such subjects as sexuality and Black women’s right to autonomy and self-fashioned happiness. Their writings represent a profound yearning for freedom and sexual fulfillment, challenging the prevailing ideology that women’s primary realm of power was in the home.

Dolpo is a Himalayan Indigenous minority community currently settled within the northern political boundary of Nepal, bordering Tibet, China. Since the territorial conquest of Mustang and other regions within the Himalayas, initiated by King Prithivi Narayan Shah and his forces under Bahadur Shah during the 1800s AD, the Dolpo community, primarily composed of semipastoralists engaged in subsistence farming and barter exchanges, appears to have followed a trajectory akin to that of Mustang (Regmi 1995). Subsequently, the Nepalese government exerted active control over northern border points with China by the 1950s, largely in response to the increasing presence of the Khamba rebellion in the border areas (McGranahan 2018). Prior to this governmental oversight, the people of Dolpo predominantly adhered to their customary governance system, sustaining subsistence-based agriculture, relative autonomy, and trans-Himalayan trade for nearly a century. Upon the consolidation of territorial control, the rural region witnessed not only the presence of Indian police and officials from the Nepali government, but also the segmentation of Dolpo communities into various political administrative divisions, including village development committees (VDCs) and wards, which were subsequently integrated into the district-level administrative entity known as Dolpa. These mechanisms emerged as a moral framework to proselytize the recalcitrant raite (subject). Despite the inclusion of certain community members within these lower-level structures, Hindu authorities implemented these social and political realities without consulting the Dolpo community.

With the strengthening of Indigenous movements during the 1990s and the subsequent institutionalization of the National Federation of Indigenous Nationalities (NFDIN) in the early 2000s, the Nepalese government recognized the Dolpo as one of the 59 Indigenous nationalities.

The conclusion summarizes chapter findings and brings them in mutual conversation. This is focused on assessing the nature of integration in Shiʿite-European interactions, substantiating the thesis on European Shiʿism, of peripheral engagement and religious retention. Assimilation defined in the introduction as a negative value distribution for cultural maintenance and outgroup relations (following Berry’s model) has few empirical referents among Shiʿite organizations in Europe, while segregation – assessing outgroup relations negatively and cultural maintenance positively - was associated with a particular historical moment. Integration, to the contrary - where both variables are positively valued or pursued – is a dominant occurrence, but it matters to discern in each case what drives it. Contrary to externalist views, European Shiʿism is held to emerge through a religious mode of engagement, involving hierarchizations of collective self and other identities. Shiʿite parties further removed or with greater independence from the high centres religious authority abroad are more likely to engage in cultural exchange with their European milieu. On the one side stands the mainstream of Shiʿite organizational life that often demonstrates bracketed, provisional, or otherwise limited formal engagement of others in Europe. The other shows striking cases of civic outreach, ritual transformation, and integrationist theology.

This chapter characterizes The Sisterhood, a group of Black women writers who met in New York at least once a month for two years and who advocated for Black women at trade publishers such as Random House, at magazines such as Ms. and Essence, and eventually in academic departments as they moved their intellectual labor from political organizing in the 1960s and early 1970s to literary organizing in the late 1970s and then, after the 1980s, into colleges and universities. It traces how The Sisterhood’s collaborative labor shaped the reach, form, and content of African American poetry through a Black feminist poetics rooted in a both/and way of thinking and writing that insisted on the interdependence of political, literary, and academic spheres. They believed in literature as a tool for Black liberation. In works by poets such as Harryette Mullen, Erica Hunt, Mahogany Browne, Tara Betts, and Evie Shockley, each of these aspects of The Sisterhood’s poetic legacy remains visible in Black feminist poetry today.

Harlem’s sensuous poetics refers to an aesthetic sensibility that turned toward the possibilities of feeling, sense, and perception – the realm of the sensuous – to imagine new experiences of Black bodies and pleasure. Its poets drew from the maelstrom of urban life (nightlife in particular) to conjure new ways of inhabiting the body, new desires, and new ways of moving individually and collectively. They provided a new way to understand the role of Harlem as a space of illicit sexuality and self-expression in poetry. This chapter surveys this tradition, situating Harlem’s sensuous poetics in the context of representational challenges to the politics of respectability that shaped Black middle-class cultural norms in the era. It looks first to recurrent poetic tropes (such as the “dancing girl” and the “laughing boy”) that contested such politics. It then turns to the enunciation of a sensuous poetics within normative middle-class institutions such as women’s civic clubs and literary salons. In doing so, it argues that this tradition is less a set of formal principles than a way of being in the world that begins from the body’s sense perception and its felt response.

Following the Black Arts Movement, emerging Black cosmopolitan poets such as Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa published poetry that appeared to be quite different than poetry of the 1960s and 1970s. Both poets took pains in their writing to assert both racial affiliation and a world citizen identity. While early cosmopolitan theory struggled to accommodate race, more recent scholarship by Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo (Black cosmopolitanism) and Susan Koshy (minority cosmopolitanism) provides useful conceptual frames that explain why a contemporary Black poet might pursue a cosmopolitan poetic and show how it works in actual poems. Readings of selected poems across both poets’ œuvres demonstrate their deepening cosmopolitan sensibility over time, revealing how they position themselves and their work within a frame inclusive of both Black identity and a relatively privileged, global perspective. Having established the features of a Black cosmopolitan poetics in the work of two major poets of this generation, a question arises. Does the poetry of the current generation of Black poets, those following Komunyakaa and Dove, perhaps exhibit a post-cosmopolitan perspective?

While ethnicity remains the bedrock of Shiʿite organization, it is overlain with religio-political identities. This chapter treats a Europe-wide organization in the quadrant of marjaʿiyat-oriented bodies that are pro-velāyat-e faqih (the Ettehādiye). As this alignment suggests East-West, top-down religious transmission (the ‘model’), the question arises of whether it precludes European identity. Two cases of clerical organizations are cited, one associated with Ayatollah Fāzel-Lankerāni, that recognize the relevance of European particularity – as in stronger ecumenist than sectarian self-presentation. The picture is further complicated by a dissection of authority and identity flows in the lay Iranian student Ettehādiye, or ‘Union.’ Among the Union’s peculiarities (‘modes’ of European Shiʿism) were grassroots initiative and Islamist vanguard formation. The political clergy were its lodestar, but none controlled the Union before the Iranian revolution. When incorporation followed, reformism emerged within its ranks, imagining an alternative religio-political system. Even within this cluster of Shiʿite organizations, in other words, ‘crossflows of identity and authority’ occur. But where European inspiration travelled up and East post-1979, it was not a match for Islamic Republican control of the organization. Unlike the civic cases of the first chapter, its struggles remain internal, focused on Iranian state politics, and distant from Shiʿite-European interaction.

Nepali Dalit literature is a recent development in the literary history of the country. Nepali is one of the many modern Indo-European languages widely spoken in Nepal and in some parts in India. It is primarily written in the Nāgarī1 script. It was recognized as the national language of Nepal in 1958. Besides, it has been recognized as a major Indian literary language by the Sahitya Akademi2 in India (Hutt 1991: 5). The oldest literary specimens in Nepali are the royal edicts inscribed on stelae and copper plates, dated to the thirteenth century. Since the seventeenth century the literary canon in Nepali has been dominated by high-caste Hindu writers. The first notable Nepali poet was Suvanand Das who composed panegyric verses to praise King Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha in the eighteenth century. Brahmin writer Bhanubhakta Acharya (1814–68) is widely considered as the “Father of Nepali Literature” (Hutt 1991: 5). Although high-caste Hindu writers dominate the field of literature in Nepal, many writers from different ethnic groups and marginalized castes have emerged in recent years to write about their struggles and experiences. Nepali Dalit literature is unquestionably the literary expression of Nepali Dalits. Emergence of Dalit literature in Nepal represents the act of writing back to power and caste hegemony by the Nepali Dalits.

The social structure in Nepal, much like in India, was heavily influenced by the caste system, resulting in a social hierarchy among the various groups of people. This system impacted the traditional customs and practices of the people, leading to the establishment of untouchability. Before introducing Nepali Dalit Literature, it is important first to introduce the broader sociocultural context which the Nepali Dalit literature is an integral part of.

This chapter starts from the proposition that both poetry and diaspora entail ways of configuring relationships between the general and the particular that may deviate from dominant philosophical tendencies. Without assuming a uniformly shared style or way of thinking, I argue for diaspora as the name of a common historical situation for people of African descent. Noting the concept’s emergence in the 1960s as an alternative to and continuation of older configurations of Pan-Africanism, the chapter then offers brief sketches of some key figures – Kamau Brathwaite, Dionne Brand, and M. NourbeSe Philip – and their relationships to language, gender, and politics.

A brief afterword considers the imperial moment in which the volume was prepared for production alongside the volume’s collectively told story about empire and American letters—a story that also points to some of the most exciting new directions in literary studies more broadly.