This chapter details the historical encounter between the Kandyan Kingdom and the British, which gave rise to the 1815 Kandyan Convention, a single legal document with different ontological meanings for the different signatories. Building on Chapter 1’s description of plural ontology, the chapter makes the case for thinking about sovereign encounters as a kind of “galactic” collision, through a metaphor based on how actual galaxies collide. Rather than bumping against one another, galaxies pass through one another, reformulating and disrupting each other in different ways but ultimately producing something new from the violence of the encounter. Similarly, in the sovereign ontological collision between them, the British and the Kandyans passed through and transformed one another in critical ways, including changing the geography, political economy, and raison d’état. The chapter draws on S. J. Tambiah’s work on the galactic mandala system of states in Buddhist South-East Asia to ground this cosmic metaphor in the political history of the mid nineteenth century.

The Anatomy of Absurdity contains stinging criticism of responses to a recent publication. In a section criticising overreaching curiosity, Nashe describes frivolous ‘newes’ moving, during ‘vacation times’, out into rural spaces, carrying confusion with it. The effect of this silly-season news on its rural audiences is both bathetically comic and unsettling. Nashe describes rural figures who have encountered ‘news’ of a range of prodigious events: a comet, a flood, an earthquake, and even a flying dragon – and who apply them to their own surroundings. News of far-flung events disrupts normal patterns of rural understanding and labour. These events can be traced to the 1587 ‘prodigy’ pamphlet Strange News out of Calabria, supposedly by the astrologer ‘John Doleta’. ‘Doleta’ and his work turn up repeatedly in Nashe’s corpus – most notably when used to criticise John and Gabriel Harvey in Strange News and Have With You to Saffron Walden, respectively. References to Doleta, and to other ‘prodigious’ texts form part of Nashe’s vocabulary for ridiculing the presumption of those who claim interpretative and prophetic authority, and those who are taken in by them. The rural ‘readers’ of Doleta in The Anatomy of Absurdity express a common trope in criticism of popular newsreading: that dissemination of news leads to people gaining access to reports, and to interpretations of them, that go beyond their own social and interpretative capacities. This chapter argues that Nashe’s use of such anti-news discourse is crucial to his depiction of textual culture, and to his own positioning within it.

The Conclusion brings together the various threads of ontological collision, political economy, colonial contamination, and imperial transformation to complete a picture of how the process of colonial state formation established the territorial and conceptual space within which toxic forms of anti-colonial nationalism could later flourish. These forms of toxic nationalism arose in response to the acceptance of the statist “rules of the game,” so to speak, that gradually came to shift the strategies of anti-colonial organizing not only in Ceylon by 1848, but also in India a decade later. Here the book returns to the present day, outlining research trajectories and decolonial possibilities for identifying historical sites of sovereign ontological “collisions” in order to study them pluriversally.

Thomas Nashe has been described as a ‘popular’ writer, or a ‘hack’, a major influence in the development of a writing style that could be accessible to a broader range of readers. However, most scholarship about Nashe tends to use the terms ‘popular’ and ‘professional’ writer interchangeably, suggesting a slippage that cannot be so easily justified, especially in the context of increasing criticism relating to what constitutes a ‘popular print culture’ in the late sixteenth century. This tendency nonetheless was a reflection of early modern attitudes: Nashe himself spoke of ‘prostituting his pen’, while some of his contemporaries criticised him as a ‘scurrilous pamphleteer’, indicating how connotations of ‘popularity’ and professional writing could blend in the early modern period. This chapter examines the material aspects of Nashe’s texts and their place in the print trade, his own statements of intent and readers’ responses to both his work and his public persona, in order to disentangle the vagueness about Nashe’s status as a ‘popular’ writer, and put into perspective the possibility of using the term ‘popular print culture’ in this period.

In this chapter I demonstrate how both Spenser and Shakespeare show the difficulty of establishing noble identity by pointing toward their own authorial roles as fiction-makers, spurring readers and audiences to recognize how their own responses to the text render it meaningful. Taking as my focus two recognition scenes when an apparently rustic young woman (Pastorella in The Faerie Queene, Perdita in The Winter’s Tale) is recognized to be of noble birth, I examine how both authors insist on the obvious fictionality of their work. Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s texts reject the hidden art of sprezzatura and instead make use of metapoetry and metatheater, directly drawing attention to and commenting on the fictional nature of the stories they create. Even as recognition scenes emphasize the fictional nature of the text through their use of highly conventional archetypes that are acknowledged as such, they also denaturalize gentle identity by prompting readers and audiences to connect texts’ literary performances and aristocratic role-playing in the wider society. The metapoetic and metatheatrical moments in The Faerie Queene and The Winter’s Tale encourage both explicit reflection on the authors’ self-conscious artistry and a critical examination of social fictions.