This chapter attends to the legacies of Indian Ocean migrations in Indian contexts, where nationalist politics also underwent a process of conflating national identity with not just territory, but with women as integral to that territorial sense of nationhood. Specifically, it examines queer desire and the gendered construction of the nation through Mauritian writer Ananda Devi’s novel Indian Tango (2007). Devi rewrites Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptation (1984) of Rabindranath Tagore’s influential national allegory Ghare-Bāire (The Home and the World) (1916) from a transnational queer feminist perspective. Examining the novel’s intertextual relationship with Tagore’s text, Ray’s film, and early twentieth century anti-indenture discourses, the chapter argues that Devi reorients feminine desire towards an erotic autonomy that reimagines diasporic affiliation and challenges the control of female sexuality within the heterosexual family as the basis of the nation. The assertion of diasporic connection through female erotic autonomy doubly deconstructs the Indian nationalist subject defined through the exclusion of the diasporic other as well as the queer female other.

The Introduction sets the scene for the book’s chapters and analysis. On the northern periphery of Nairobi, in southern Kiambu County, the city’s expansion into a landscape of poor smallholders is bringing new opportunities, dilemmas, and conflicts. Profoundly shaped by Kenya’s colonial history, Kiambu’s ‘workers with patches of land’ struggle to sustain their households while the skyrocketing price of land ratchets up gendered and generational tensions over their meagre plots, with consequences for class futures. Land sale by senior men turns would-be inheritors, their young adult sons, into landless and land-poor paupers, heightening their exposure to economic precarity. The Introduction sets out how these dynamics are lived at the site of kinship, and how moral principles of patrilineal obligation and land retention fail in the face of market opportunity. Within this context, the Introduction sets out the book’s exploration of how Kiambu’s young men struggle to sustain hopes for middle-class lifestyles as the economic ground shifts beneath their feet.

Chapter 1 introduces the region of Kiambu in detail, establishing the stakes of moral debate over wealth amongst men in the region. While an older generation preaches the labour ideology (the notion that hard work will bring success) that allowed them to prosper in the aftermath of independence, it has been undermined by dwindling land holdings and opportunities for ‘off-farm income’, creating a crisis of hopelessness as young men wonder if they will ever reach the ‘level’ of their elders. Framing the study of masculine destitution to follow, the chapter discusses the legacies of the ‘Kenya Debate’, a regional debate in political economy about the relative prosperity of Kenya’s peasantry after independence. It argues for a processual, non-static approach to economic change in central Kenya, allowing us to see how class divides have been opened across generations due to population pressure on land. Its subdivision within families exerts stronger pressure on young family members who find themselves in the situation of being virtual paupers – land poor and ‘hustling’ for cash.

To gain a fuller understanding of modern Mizrahi literature, it must be examined against the background of the literary systems in which Jews in the Arab, Muslim, and Ottoman world operated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the diverse paths via which these systems developed in the Middle East and North Africa, based on their various linguistic, cultural, and political relations and interactions with the Arab awakening (Al-Nahḍa), the Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah), the European enlightenment, French and British colonialism, local nationalism and Zionism, and modern Arab and Hebrew literatures. Under the decisive influence of the new world orders created by colonialism and nationalism, this period saw far-reaching changes in Jewish literature in the Arab, Muslim, and Ottoman world. It may be profitable to view all those connections as part of the process via which Mizrahi literature was formed. Due to its many areas of interaction with various literatures, it began or was created repeatedly, in different ways that reflect its diversity. Only by looking at the whole is it possible to avoid narrowing the narrative of modern Mizrahi literature to a single perspective or single process.

Corruption became a problem in Hong Kong as the colonial state extended its reach over a bustling entrepôt economy. Shifting boundaries separating the public and the private marked traditional norms of gift-giving and reciprocity as problematic. In the second half of the twentieth century, British officials saw corruption as a “Chinese” problem. This culturalist thesis was disembedded: It discounted the racialized hierarchy of colonial governance and overlooked the embeddedness of corruption within its power structure. Yet the cultural thesis was a visible ideological support that justified the rule of difference. This racialized structure was momentarily upended in 1973, when Peter Godber, a senior British police officer, fled Hong Kong while under investigation for taking bribes. The scandal led to the creation of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), an independent unit that supposedly stood outside of the racialized organization of the police. Through a reading of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s declassified correspondence, this chapter argues that, while the ICAC was an independent unit that tackled corruption, it remained embedded within the broader racialized structure that defined colonialism. Though misleading and sociologically naïve, the culturalist thesis of corruption can be and is often ideologized to justify colonial domination.

This chapter studies the controversy that led to the founding of East India Company College as a training institute for future administrators of British India. Governor-General Richard Wellesley’s unilateral decision in 1798 to establish a mandatory training college at Fort William, Calcutta, for all new recruits of the East India Company precipitated a conflict that embroiled the Court of Directors of the Company and the parliamentary Board of Control. I show that the language of corruption in this imperial context was transformed from accusations of personal enrichment to questions regarding procedural propriety, institutional overreach, and cultural difference. The Court of Directors could not refute Wellesley’s claim that Company civil servants were poorly trained. Nor did they wish to lose control over their prerogative of hiring personnel or determining the ideal qualities of an effective imperial administrator. They resolved instead to found East India College at Haileybury, formalizing a new imperial bureaucracy.

Abstract: This chapter argues that the state of nature brings into focus colonial imaginaries of land and identity. It also contends that these colonial imaginaries have come to shape the modern West more broadly.

This conclusion explores whether nostalgia can exist in postcolonial literatures, burdened as they are by traumatic histories of imperial oppression, by examining the St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott’s variation on Homeric epic, Omeros. Is nostalgia no longer relevant when a culture’s past is cut off by violence and the lost homeland cannot be restored? Or can longing for the irrecoverable past be part of a creative response to problematic histories? This inquiry crystalizes a central aim of the project: to show how nostalgia can be a means of reimagining the national past, an inclusive way of expressing commitment to a particular culture.

Abstract: The Conclusion argues that the state of nature remains central to understanding the fractured condition of modern Western thought, particularly in the fields of colonialism, secularism, and ecology. It highlights the continuing relevance of the notion for interpreting the fragmented imaginaries of Western modernity.

This chapter discusses poets of the South West Asian and North African diasporas who have experienced exile and loss, some as refugees. It describes a translingual pluriverse of diasporic poets from a region that has come to have many names and terminologies assigned to it. The chapter reflects on the political and cultural conditions in which diasporic writers produce poetry in Australia, in both spoken and written forms. Themes of witness, protest and identity, often interwoven, are analysed. The chapter considers the presence of poets from Arabic-, Kurdish-, Dari- and Farsi-speaking backgrounds, some of whom write in English while others have translingual practices and experiment with hybrid modes. It assesses the impact of settler monolingualism in Australia and argues for the importance of multilingual poetry in articulating cultural diversity and challenging delimiting discursive systems. The significance of literary journals is also detailed, and the value of poetry in the face of violence, displacement and prejudice is asserted.

This chapter is an overview of the life and work of Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker), whose poetry collection We Are Going (1964) was not only the first ever book of poetry by an Aboriginal person but also one of the fastest-selling books in Australian history. It traces her early involvement in civil rights in Queensland, her ongoing activism in Aboriginal struggles, and the power of her poetry to articulate the feelings and lived experiences of the Aboriginal people. It discusses Oodgeroo’s friendship with Judith Wright and her founding of Moongalba, an Aboriginal cultural and education centre on Noonuccal country. The chapter outlines her role in various national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts organisations and her international connections with Indigenous writers. Lastly, it emphasises Oodgeroo’s lifelong work in foregrounding Aboriginal cultural and political perspectives.

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.

This chapter tracks the way the accumulation of capital in the colonial metropole enabled a cross-cultural dialogue among certain poets from the East and the West in London in the 1920s and 1930s, one that gradually diminishes in the postcolonial period. Poetry, in the modernist period, sought to dismantle the binary between authenticity and derivation, a binary which has been given new life in our own moment and has, therefore, blinded us from seeing these poets as participating in a common enterprise, even if it is one beset with many conceptual pitfalls resulting from the colonial relation. Nevertheless, poets as distinct as Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, and Una Marson – and thinkers such as C. L. R. James – wished to construct a universal humanism out of the uneven terrain of imperial modernity, an impulse they shared with such complicated figures as W. B. Yeats and even the violently reactionary Ezra Pound. Ultimately, this unstable humanism gives way to the starker divides of the period of decolonization.

Royal tribute was a tax based on ancestry that linked free people to the colonial government and the Spanish monarch. For families, royal tribute was about more than the immediate pressure of tax payment. Registration as a taxpayer could alter a family’s status, or calidad, for generations. Using tax rolls and case studies of people who resisted registration, this chapter argues that families took varied strategies to try to keep off the tax registers and establish alternative expressions of their loyalty to the Spanish crown. The cases demonstrate the interpersonal, political, and gendered conflicts that arose when individuals with African ancestry resisted the obligation of royal tribute. Officials and bureaucrats denounced the actions of those who confronted agents of the tribute regime. By refusing registration, or discouraging others from complying, men and women prompted officials to reflect on what loyalty from Afro-descendants entailed.