The Western conception of haunting in literature typically evokes images of ghosts and other spirits entering our physical plane as a sign of some spiritual or emotional disruption. However, in a marked difference, African, African American and Caribbean cultures and spiritual traditions conceive of hauntings, both ancestral and otherwise, as part of their historical and contemporary epistemology. This essay considers hauntings in the works of African, African American, and Caribbean literature as serving as a bulwark against modernity with its attendant racism, capital exploitation and environmental devastation for colonised people and their descendants in the modern world. Examining short stories by Chinua Achebe, Henry Dumas, and Shani Mootoo demonstrates the multiple ways that African-based spiritual traditions decenter traditional western notions of haunting while simultaneously demonstrating the potential corrective possibilities of these traditions in a rapidly deteriorating and increasingly pernicious world for colonised peoples.

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.

In Tongoane v National Minister for Agriculture and Land Affairs, the Constitutional Court of South Africa ruled that the government’s attempt to regulate property in traditional communities through the Communal Land Rights Act (CLARA) was unconstitutional. It emphasised that traditional land was already governed by indigenous ‘living law’ and CLARA sought to replace this vernacular law, a system evolved over time, with legislation. This highlighted the presence of indigenous law predating colonialism, challenging colonial notions like ‘lex nullius’ (no law) and ‘terra nullius’ (empty land), which denied indigenous Africans their rights. This chapter argues that South Africa’s post-apartheid constitutional vision fails to fully recognise and integrate this vernacular law, undermining true transformation, and instead advocates for ‘Alter-Native Constitutionalism’, which would amalgamate ‘customary’, ‘common’ and vernacular law to reflect the realities and normative convictions of most South Africans. This approach aims to rectify historical injustices and create a more just legal system, rooted in indigenous values and addressing social and economic inequities. Explicating the indigenously feminist decolonising concept of Alter-Native Constitutionalism, the chapter calls for reconstitution of South Africa’s legal framework and content to give full voice to indigenous world-sense and law-sense, advocating a shift away from Eurocentric logics and norms.

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.

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.

This chapter aims to provide an introductory account of conceptions of natural rights in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That is, of how human beings were considered to hold certain rights by virtue of their human nature or as conferred by natural law. It will show how conceptions of natural rights differed, as embedded in different theoretical frameworks, and were put to different political, social, and religious uses. At the same time, in several instances conceptions of natural right were used ‘in action’ in similar ways, despite the different theological or philosophical frameworks in which they were imbedded. Despite differences, then, early modern conceptions of natural rights shared some features, and were put to uses, that may seem counterintuitive to the modern reader.

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.