This chapter theorizes place as both an object and an agent of renewal, taking, as its case study, Ben Jonson’s revision of Every Man in His Humour. Although the play was set in Florence when first performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1598, Jonson shifts that setting to London when preparing Every Man in His Humour for his 1616 folio. Beneath this remarkable change lie several striking continuities, including Jonson’s repeated allusions to the New World. Such allusions are effectively reprinted in the 1616 folio, and yet they are simultaneously rewritten through Jonson’s change of setting. To trace the effects of such rewriting, the chapter documents the deepening imbrication of England and the New World in the first decades of the seventeenth century, showing, in turn, how Jonson’s revisions of Every Man in His Humour both acknowledge and manage the consequences of this imbrication for his comedy of humors.

In this concluding chapter, I summarize my arguments for the study of the global politics of religion, international political theory, and the study of colonial, postcolonial, and de-colonial politics. In the field of religion and politics, I illustrated the productive power of the exclusion narrative and reconstructed the concept of ‘religion’ at work in the rehabilitating narrative of recognition. In the field of IR theory, I emphasize the need to study the costs of recognition and argue for a greater attentiveness to its conditions of possibility, that is to say, the processes through which the subjects and objects of global politics become intelligible, or recognizable, as such. In the field of colonial history, I show how the entwined histories of Pakistan and Israel both structured the possibilities of and were structured by the capacious concepts of ‘religion’, the ‘Muslim’, and the ‘Jew’.

This essay reflects on the challenges and intentions behind translating Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World. He examines the delicate balance between fidelity to the original and fluency in English, striving to preserve Carpentier’s baroque style and powerful themes of colonialism, slavery and racism. The chapter delves into the cultural and historical layers of the novel, especially its foundation in lo real maravilloso – a Latin American lens where the marvelous and real coexist. Through personal insight, the author portrays translation as both an impossible and an essential act that revitalizes meaning for contemporary readers.

This chapter reflects on modern and contemporary narratives surrounding the modern ‘racing’ of the inhabitants of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt by focusing on two cases, each of which pertains to a local woman. Both of these women’s bodies have become, two millennia or so after their death, a racial canvas at best, and a battlefield at worst. The first woman is the one portrayed on a funerary portrait on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris. The second woman needs no introduction: She was Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh of Macedonian-ruled Egypt.

‘Pan-Asianism’ came to prominence after the Second World War. Beyond the conventional understanding of the link between pan-Asianism and Japanese imperialism since then, this chapter explains the role of pan-Asianism as an anti-imperial ideology and strategy in the early twentieth century. As an anti-imperial ideology, pan-Asianism advanced a normative argument for the emancipation of Asia from Western imperialism and provided an alternative to Eurocentric discourse on civilisation, a vision premised upon a shared Asian spirituality, heritage, culture and glorious past. As an anti-imperial strategy, pan-Asianism offered Indian nationalist leaders in exile a language to gain support of the Japanese and the Chinese for their nationalist movement against British rule. Although pan-Asianism later came to be used as a justification in Japanese imperialism, it is important to highlight the anti-imperial role that pan-Asianism played in the early twentieth century. This chapter does so by analysing the works of leading Pan-Asianist ideologues and activists of the period and by highlighting the ideological and strategic aspects of their conception of pan-Asianism as anti-imperialism.

This chapter provides an overview of the entangled history between the discipline of Classics and the biological concept of race. Section I.1 outlines the emergence of problematic claims about the alleged White nature of Graeco-Roman antiquity from the modern era to the present day that have helped substantiate biological conceptions of race. Section I.2 examines scholarly work in critical race theory and early modern studies that offer more nuanced definitions of race beyond the biological. Section I.3 summarises work on the study of race in Classics, and Section I.4 discusses the contents of this Companion.

In this chapter, the ties between the nation, racial identity, and the role of classicism are traced as an identity marker. Alt-right – or identitarian – movements and the nation are coterminous in their racialization, an association that their redeployment of antiquity reifies. Analysis of the nation, Whiteness, and antiquity draws examples from the West, particularly the United States, in terms of the wayward identitarian movements that have been proliferating. Although the nation controls the apparatus of the state, identitarian movements benefit from new means of communication, namely, the Internet, and social media. I imagine a way out of the paradox of identitarianism through alternative uses of classicism. This way out is also an end of nation, as opposed to Fukuyama’s end of history, which depends on the strength of nations and states.

This chapter examines the theological and political ramifications of Sancho’s imaginings of the afterlife. While he doesn’t believe in Hell, Sancho uses the figurative language of infernal character to criticize chattel slavery, religious bigotry, and British colonialism. When he describes Heaven, meanwhile, Sancho projects himself and his readers into an ideal religious collective that includes American Quakers, enslaved West Africans, Roman Catholics, Hindus, and Muslim clerics, as well as fellow Anglican Protestants. Attending to Sancho’s notion of the afterlife reveals the distinctiveness of his religious thought among Black anti-slavery intellectuals. His pluralistic definition of religious virtue allows him to extend belonging further than his contemporaries – beyond co-religionists and even beyond the category of the Christian. Logics of mixture and mingling in Sancho’s letters enable him to enlarge divine love and salvation without universalizing belief, holding a multiracial and trans-denominational community together without eliding differences.

This chapter explores the constructed nature of environmental understanding through colonial, neocolonial, postcolonial and ecofeminist lenses. It begins by dissecting the binary opposition of nature versus civilisation as shaped by colonial narratives, revealing how this dichotomy justified the exploitation of Indigenous populations, women and natural resources. The analysis extends to neocolonial practices – such as land-grabbing and neoliberal economic expansion – and their environmental repercussions. Through literary and filmic examples like Robinson Crusoe and Cast Away, the chapter highlights how survival narratives reinforce human supremacy and commodify nature. It then critically examines the idealisation of Indigenous peoples as ‘noble savages’ and the romanticised notion of nature as a Garden of Eden. Moving towards constructive alternatives, it foregrounds postcolonial and ecofeminist approaches that challenge anthropocentrism, promote interconnectedness and embrace Indigenous cosmologies centred around earth goddesses like Pachamama and Papatūānuku. The chapter concludes with a case study on Brendon Grimshaw’s ecological restoration of Moyenne Island, advocating for grassroots conservation and ethical environmental care. Ultimately, the chapter urges readers to reassess dominant narratives and join collective efforts to protect and regenerate nature.

This chapter argues that the origins of the Capitalocene, which locates the roots of planetary crisis in capitalistic accumulation and exploitation, can be found in the nineteenth century. The Victorian period not only witnessed the rise of fossil-fueled modernity – an acceleration of global industrialization fueled by coal and colonialism – but also produced searing critiques of capitalism in some of its most enduring literature. Central to my analysis is Olive Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), a fictional admonition of Cecil Rhodes and his British South African Company. This chapter reads Trooper Peter alongside The Story of an African Farm (1883) and From Man to Man (1926) to illuminate Schreiner’s critique of colonial capitalism and Rhodes’s expansionism. Schreiner rebukes capitalism’s frontier process and challenges hierarchical constructions of nature and humanity, exposing capitalism’s normalization of racial and sexual exploitation, while also imagining alternative modes of more-than-human solidarity.

This chapter probes the relation between realism and the georgic in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The georgic is generally not associated with that period, and realism was allegedly on the decline. Yet, in focusing on an agricultural setting in rural Bengal, Lal Behari Day’s novel Govinda Samanta, or Bengal Peasant Life (1874) vivifies the connection between the two in ways that enhance both our understanding of the modes of colonial critique as well as the dispersed evolution of literary genres.

In this chapter I argue that Cuba and Puerto Rico embraced racial projects based on the myth of a “racial democracy” that idealized the harmonious integration of whites, Blacks, and Mulattoes to combat colonialism and promote nationalism under Spanish and US hegemony. However, I propose that the ideology of white supremacy, rooted in colonial slavery, continues to prevail in contemporary Cuba and Puerto Rico – despite the numerous contrasts between the two countries. This renders the assertion of Blackness problematic and precarious in both places. Effacing Blackness as an integral part of national identity has been a recurrent theme in the colonial and postcolonial histories of Cuba and Puerto Rico, together with the privileging of whiteness.

Chapter 2 tells the story of how ethnicity came to be known in Kenya through territory, providing an overview of the history of ethnic territorial boundary drawing from its inception with the first colonial administration, to today. The principal motivation for the earliest hard boundaries between purportedly homogenous ethnic groups was to free up land for white settlement and capital accumulation. After independence, the administrative boundaries of provinces and districts were deliberately retained, and ethnic patterns of land settlement were engineered. With multi-party elections in the 1990s, these established ‘ethnic territories’ motivated electoral gerrymandering, the most significant postcolonial driver of ethnic territorialisation. All these practices cemented a profound connection between land, boundaries, identity, rights, power, and security. I show how the 2010 constitution worked within this paradigm, too, but in novel ways that moved toward vagueness to manage the inflammatory, grievance-based politics tethered to boundary drawing in Kenya. In doing so, I show how ethnic territorial population concentration today is less certain than commonly imagined.