This chapter analyzes Pablo Neruda’s engagement with the English-speaking world. Neruda’s presence made an indelible mark on the cultural spheres in the United States, United Kingdom, and other countries where English is used, notably through his English translations, international travels, and engagement with Anglophone literature. His Nobel Prize in 1971 solidified his status globally, yet his reception in the United States and United Kingdom was affected by Cold War politics. Neruda’s vast literary network, knowledge of Anglophone poetry, and cultural exchanges shaped his impact in the United States and United Kingdom, in particular. Exploring these aspects, supported by the poet’s own memoirs, literary studies, translations, and lasting influence in popular culture, highlights his legacy in the English-speaking realm. Neruda’s intercultural interactions therein emphasize the complex political atmosphere during many major events of the twentieth century in which Neruda played a crucial role and became well-known as both Chile’s greatest poet and a hero for the political Left.

Non-normative sexual and gender identities are not new to Africa, but their representation in literary texts has grown significantly over the past two decades, establishing queer literature as a burgeoning genre. This chapter focuses on what defines “queer” in African literature and examines its key features. It compares literary production from different regions of the continent, highlighting both continuities and diversity in the representation of queerness. Particular attention is given to Anglophone and Francophone literary traditions to consider the similarities and divergences in representations of queerness across these linguistic and cultural contexts. These literary analyses are interwoven with scholarly debates, showing how literature and academic discourse on African queerness inform and influence one another. Drawing on Keguro Macharia’s concept of “frottage,” the chapter examines how interactions between African and queer identities can evoke both generative and conflictual affects. The chapter ultimately interrogates the politics of queer representation in literature, particularly in queerphobic contexts in Africa. In so doing, the chapter explores how literature not only makes queerness visible but also negotiates difference and nonconformity.

This chapter examines the “verse politics” of eighteenth-century Asia. It explores how Anglophone authors used epics and ruin poetry to advance imperialism, assess governmental policy, and reimagine the role of India in the British Empire. To demonstrate poetry’s role in politics and imperial policymaking, this chapter focuses on the career of Eyles Irwin, a colonial administrator stationed in Madras during the 1770s and 1780s and one of the earliest authors to publish English poetry while in India. The chapter analyzes his collection of travel poems, the Occasional Epistles (1783), and his lengthy poetic epistle, “The Ruins of Madura, or, the Hindoo Garden” (c. 1785–92), which versifies the holy sites and gardens of an ancient southern Indian city, Madura (Madurai), and the decayed palace of one of its Hindu rulers, Tirumala Nayaka. From these details, and Madura’s ruins, Irwin reanimates a South Indian culture and polity. Epics and ruin poetry reimagined writing about empire not as an attempt at personal fame but as an extension of imperial policy, and in ruin poetry Anglophone authors sought to reconcile the obvious oppression of India with the supposed liberty of Britain’s empire.

In the spirit of decolonization, the chapter argues that we read English as a vernacular and not simply a global or colonial language. It takes seriously the emphasis on “speakers” – people and technologies/media – in the “phone” of anglophone literatures to find vernacular grounds to read literary English from. The chapter parses the political meanings of English through the contested political and mediated lives it has across the world in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan), Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and anglophone Africa. For instance, English is not only a formerly colonial language in South Asia or a language of the postcolonial state in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. It is also a populist language that mediates Dalit, racioethnic, and Indigenous assertion against the fascist logics of postcolonial vernaculars like Hindi, Urdu, and Sinhala. Here, English often lives outside literary works – in other media and in other languages – as “less than a language,” as a sound, a sight, and materiality that inflects meanings on the page.Literary studies have long been concerned with the liberal axiom of voice – who speaks – and thus sought to bring new voices into the scholarly field. Through specific literary examples from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this chapter asks the critic to situate themselves and their conceptual categories: who listens and how? Which English is legitimized as “English” and which as its “other”? How do we, as readers, make English speak on the page? I use “vernacular” as a term to highlight the embodied and material mediations of English that alter its colonial meanings, as well as the very real political and multivalent desire to make common that animates English as eminently global and mobile. Vernacular names the colonial and transnational capitalist structures associated with English without re-inscribing them each time we discuss English.

Chapter 1 makes use of two empirical approaches. Its first part uses property law from 136 jurisdictions in an unsupervised machine-learning method (hierarchical clustering) that divide these jurisdictions into 10 legal families. Unlike the traditional wisdom that highlights the difference between common law and civil law, this chapter finds that, in terms of property doctrines, a trichotomy better describes the legal systems: one big group is jurisdictions affected by French property law; another big group is composed of jurisdictions that follow or resemble German property law; and the final group contains common-law jurisdictions, Nordic countries, and a number of socialist jurisdictions. The second part of Chapter 1 re-combines 156 jurisdictions into 149 countries, and computes the correlation coefficients among each country pair, to show dyadic similarities in property law.

Anglophone Caribbean literature written by Black women writers across the diaspora in the 1980s emerges as a transformative, genre-bending, and defiant force. This period of Caribbean literature marks a period of transition that reflects the contradictory experiences of postcolonial island nations grappling with governance, migration, failed and uneven development, and the unfinished (failed) project of decolonization. Caribbean women writers during this period addressed this project through multiple genres and paid careful attention to the lives of women who countered the male-dominated Caribbean literary canon of the 1920s–1970s. The evolution of Black women’s writing across the diaspora from the 1980s and into the 1990s reflects a clear shift and response to the interlocking systems of oppression affecting the lives of Black women. For Caribbean migrant and Caribbean American Black women, these intersections and complexities are layered with the traumatic experiences of migration and coloniality while grappling with place and space, subjectivity and sexuality, identity and self-worth.