Even when they were produced within colonial systems or in the crucible of cultural nationalism, African literature and art in the twentieth century were inseparable from global cultural movements most notably modernism. Nevertheless, for reasons discussed in this chapter, the idea of a modern or contemporary art in Africa has often been resisted by Euro-American (and even African) critics and the institutions of art and literary criticism, which have historically located African creativity in a premodern realm. This chapter is a critique of this location of African art outside the epistemologies and forms of modernism. Originating as a comprehensive review of “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994,” a landmark exhibition of African art curated by Okui Enwezor in 2002, this chapter seeks to go beyond the denial of the modernism of African art and, through a close examination of Enwezor’s project, identifies the modernist aesthetic as a dynamic form that was indispensable to the African imagination in the twentieth century.

This chapter sets out to ask difficult questions and to explore how the context of writing, for example exile in the USA, overdetermines how a writer like Ngugi engages his craft. Has Ngugi’s audience shifted during his stay in the USA and what kind of publics is he seeking to hail in his fiction, essays and memoirs? Who reads him? Ngugi’s forced exiled in Europe and the USA has complicated Ngugi’s writing and especially his return to English. Deprived of direct contact with his target audience and working outside the institutions of learning in Africa, Ngugi has been forced to repurpose his works for a new audience.

This chapter explores how Ngugi in his creative works draws on the Mau Mau war for content and inspiration not only because it affected him directly but also due to its symbolic significance in the pursuit of human dignity and the solidarity that it built among Kenyan communities. By looking back at the effects of colonialism and the experiences of the struggle for independence, the chapter argues, Ngugi tries to make sense of that past because he was a product of that violent history. The chapter explores what it has meant for Ngugi to write under the shadow of nationalism and to fictionalise the traumatic experiences of his childhood. In the process, the chapter shows how the narrative of Mau Mau recurs in the postcolonial period and how Ngugi’s understanding of nationalism changes over time even as the organising principles of land, freedom and justice have remained constant.

The story of Brexit in Scotland was about whether – and, if so, how – Scotland’s vote to Remain in the EU was to be acknowledged. In Albert Hirschman’s terminology, was it to be through the exercise of voice – a role for Scotland’s representatives in influencing the form of EU withdrawal and its domestic implications or through exit, by triggering a second independence referendum? In the end it was neither. The UK-wide majority to Leave the EU prevailed, with no concessions to the Scottish government’s preferred form of Brexit and no second independence referendum. This result exposed radically conflicting visions of the nature of the UK’s territorial constitution – a Union State based on Scottish popular sovereignty, or a Unitary State based on the sovereignty of the UK Parliament. A Brexit premised on the restoration of Parliamentary sovereignty and the desire to ‘take back control’ laid bare the subaltern nature of the Union-State account and the fragility of Scotland’s constitutional protections within the Union. Devolution in Scotland has been left diminished and the pathway towards independence mired in uncertainty.

Starting in the late 1820s, African American poets began to write in concert with the abolition movement, and their work began to appear in anti-slavery periodicals. In these efforts, they translated the aesthetic theories of European Romanticism, and imagined Black consciousness beyond the confines of slavery and racism. Especially in the two decades before the Civil War, poets such as George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, Joseph Cephas Holly, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper undertook a wildly various range of formal experiments in the service of ending slavery and reconstructing Black cultural life. This chapter undertakes a survey of a number of the antebellum period’s Black poets, with the idea of thinking through the prophetic scope of their claims on history. It argues that in taking this posture, the Black Romantic poets anticipated more recent claims about the long-durational character of the Black radical tradition.

Bieral’s enlistment in the US Navy during the Panic of 1837 marked his transition from urban rowdy to global adventurer. Serving aboard the U.S.S. Columbia, he participated in a diplomatic and punitive expedition across Asia and the Pacific, including a retaliatory assault on Sumatran villages. The chapter details the brutal discipline aboard naval vessels, highlighting the normalization of corporal punishment and racial integration among sailors. Bieral’s promotion and survival amid disease and violence underscore his resilience. The voyage exemplifies the intersection of nationalism, violence, and racial fluidity.

As the French empire expanded throughout northern and western Africa and from Pondicherry in India east to Royal Vietnam, a new secular mission came into being, one married to the contradictions of aggressive imperialism, a revolutionary past, and democratic governance. Civilisation was elevated to the rarefied realms of imperial law. French colonial administrators and jurists equipped with the prejudices of the metropole carried with them a powerful vision of republican empire to the Mekong, the great river system that lies at the proverbial heart of mainland South East Asia. Yet republican colonialism was undermined by below. In Indo-China, young radicals, jurists, politicians, journalists and scholars engaged in bitter fighting with the creation of a panoptic model of state surveillance, economic exploitation, political repression, racism and the ambiguities of French republicanism. From the creation of the Indo-Chinese Union in 1887 to its demise in 1954, the multiple transformations of legal boundaries in Indo-China reflected the evolving international relations and anti-colonial agitations in Asia. They formed a crucial conjecture in the history of international law.

When Elizabeth Maconchy entered the British compositional scene in 1930 with the premiere of her orchestral suite, The Land, she and her fellow composers had an unsettled relationship with the prevailing musical styles of Europe. Whereas continental composers were highly regarded by British critics as cutting edge, their British contemporaries were faulted as derivative, unoriginal, and too steeped in national traditions to contribute to the ‘new’ music. Constant Lambert argued his rival countrymen (and women) had let their moment to be ‘modern’ pass them by. This chapter examines the scope of modernism on the continent and scholars’ difficulties in pinning down a precise functional definition of the so-called ‘modernist’ style. Practitioners of European modernism sought to be sensational or at the very least individual. British modernism, on the other hand, tended toward the juxtaposition of ‘old’ and ‘new’, an eclecticism that is not bound to any specific ideology.

This chapter focuses on blackface in Argentina, and on the larger implications embedded within the practice in that specific nation. The particularities of its use in the Argentine context are significant because of the country’s powerful nation-building mythology, which holds there are no Black people in the nation. Numerous scholarly investigations have demonstrated the consistent and sustained presence of Africans and Afrodescendants throughout the country’s history.

Issues of race and racism have been highly controversial in contemporary China. This chapter examines the significance of various events and the polemics they provoked around the politics of race and nationalism. Indeed, the controversy has to be appreciated in light of the rise of nationalistic feelings among Chinese netizens, who have insisted that the fashion world should no longer cater to Western aesthetics and should align with the aesthetics of Chinese people.

The Introduction offers the reader a way into the 1810s through Anna Letitia Barbauld’s bleak, prophetic satire, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem (1812). A poem written amidst the tensions of war, famine, unemployment, food shortages, and economic decline, it also serves as a record of the peculiarity of this decade as one caught amidst a flurry of new ideas, beliefs, and concepts, but without a clear sense of how such newness might be understood, interpreted, or even accepted. The chapter reads Barbauld’s poem as a framing device to introduce the twelve chapters that comprise the volume and their shared concerns with sexuality and identity, religion and politics, race and gender, disability and the environment, aesthetics and philanthropy, communication and confusion, and social and interspecies relations.