The origins of Arthur are in the Welsh language, and this chapter presents the Welsh Arthur from those origins to the end of the Middle Ages and beyond. While Geoffrey of Monmouth reconfigured the Arthur he found, propelling him into a new trajectory, the Galfridian route does not provide the telos for the Welsh material: the most important manuscripts of the period show court poets and prose writers engaging self-consciously with traditions old and new, aware of the colonial implications of French and English Arthurs, and energetically navigating strategies of irony, satire, postcolonial reimagining and culturally confident re-engagement with the pre-Galfridian (and pre-Chrétien). Arthur is at once signifier of the ‘Britain’ of the bards (a half-imagined Welsh-speaking Britain, inheritor of Romanitas) and a field of signification on which to project contemporary political realities, over the best part of a good millennium.

The modern world has been shaped by imperialism, a practice engaged in by all great powers and some lesser ones. Empires are history but their consequences are not. Their dissolution has given rise to a multitude of new states, restored independence to formerly independent units, and reduced the size and influence of former metropoles. Decolonization, whether peacefully or violently accomplished, has given rise to a series of new conflicts among successor states, among neighboring states, and between metropoles and former colonies. We might lump these conflicts together as post-imperial. If so, many kinds of conflicts would fit under this rubric. They could encompass colonial and postcolonial conflicts, rump states, partitioned countries, and arguably other categories as well like revenge and regional rivalries. I have accordingly opted for a finer-grained analysis.

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.

In 2007, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognized their particular historical losses and protected their future as collective entities, including their distinctive claims to land. In a multi-sited genealogy, Miranda Johnson explores how long-term historical identities were reforged – in stages after World War II, and against the prevalence of assimilative ideologies – through the elaboration of common Indigenous claim-making of far-flung groups, coming to regard a parallel historic dispossession and current disempowerment.

As postcolonialism turned its attention to African literature, culture, and intellectual history, a number of very productive alliances between postcolonial theory and theories of globalization, subaltern studies, decoloniality, and transnational cultural studies emerged, but the relationship to poststructuralism has always been an ambivalent one. Taking Sunday Anozie’s debt to structuralism as a point of departure, the shift from structuralist to poststructuralist readings – with specific reference to Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, and Achille Mbembe – is seen as indicative of a general move from a relatively static model of analysis to a more dynamic one. Using the case studies of Sony Lab’ou Tansi and Abdelkebir Khatibi, the chapter argues that the theoretical richness and dynamism of poststructuralism, as evidenced by the proliferation of its tropes and strategic gestures, demonstrates clearly its value and potential for contemporary African contexts.

This chapter asks if there are specifically African varieties of what in the 1990s became known as postcolonialism. Sociologically, academic postcolonialism was a consequence of mobility between the North and the South. Perhaps because of this, it was often received hesitantly in Africa – hence the importance of looking more closely at its localized uptake. Taking Anthony Appiah’s seminal article on postmodernism and postcolonialism as one point of departure, the chapter traces this delicate balance between Africa-focused and outward-oriented thinking in work by David Attwell (South Africa), Inocência Mata (in relation to Angola), and Ana Mafalda Leite (Mozambique), among others. Of importance here is the alternative to Marxist analysis that postcolonialism provided at the time, as well as its critique of nationalism, but also how postcolonialism’s afterlife in Africanist thinking today is registered in the turn to popular and everyday aspects of culture.

This chapter accounts for the recurring fixation in African literary discourse on the continuities between African orality and written African literatures. It highlights the astonishing range of the African oral heritage and underscores its deployment in modern African writing as literary nationalism and resistance to cultural imperialism or as facets of Indigenous formalist experimentations. The chapter pays particular attention to the debates that illuminate the implications of the transposition of orality to writing and sets in relief the scholars who have played pivotal roles in that discourse; it equally annotates several representative texts to underscore the quality of orality and the implications of its transposition into writing. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the current state of African orality and envisioning its future in written African literature.

Critical Security Studies (CSS) is a diverse and multidisciplinary field that approaches traditional security studies through a critical lens and examines the ways in which security discourses and practices reify and reinforce existing power relations and contribute to the marginalization, oppression, and precarity of various groups of people. CSS scholars ask whose security we center when we talk “Security,” and whose security we neglect or sacrifice, what issues are present/absent, who is afforded agency, and who appear only as voiceless victims. They examine the ways in which security and power are intertwined so that evoking security can generate power, enable various kinds of interventions, perpetuate relations of domination and subjugation, and reproduce social hierarchies. Many CSS scholars adopt an interpretivist methodology and normative approach to scientific knowledge; they are interested in analysis not just for the sake of it but for bringing about change to the status quo.

The chapter analyzes the crisis and expansion of human rights in the 1970s as a dual phenomenon of the population control movement. It explores the disillusionment among population control activists due to the failure to achieve desired fertility rate reductions despite international efforts. The chapter highlights the shift in perspectives on the human rights framework for population control, with criticisms emerging from various actors including demographers, sociologists, and international organizations. The chapter also discusses the emergence of new actors such as the women’s movement in advocating for human rights in family planning. It argues that UN reports on family planning were shaped by conflicting political imaginaries between UN member states along Cold War and North–South divides. Furthermore, it delves into the debates among international lawyers regarding coercion, national sovereignty, and the role of international law in addressing population growth. It argues that international lawyers saw the legal regulation of population control as a test of the effectivness of international law as such.

This chapter discusses how writers in the twenty-first century have responded to the legacies of postmodernism. It details various attempts at configuring a post-postmodernism before offering close analysis of a series of British writers who have entered a critical dialogue with postmodernism through their fiction. The novelists are discussed with respect to three main areas. First, the identification of an ethical turn in selected fiction produced by writers associated with postmodernism whose careers were established in the last quarter of the twentieth century (Amis, Barnes, Byatt, McEwan, Winterson). Second, British writers who emerge after 9/11 who, although they adopt several techniques associated with postmodernism, incorporate a new, tentative idealism and elements of realism in terms of both literary form and philosophical belief (Mitchell, Barker, Ali Smith). Third, it looks at how discourses around postcolonialism and multiculturalism impact with postmodernism in selected fiction (Ali, Levy, Rushdie, Zadie Smith).

This chapter examines the way in which the Holocaust has been brought into conversation with understandings of the modern world, with a strong focus on historical and sociological accounts (though recognizing the place of the Holocaust in postmodern literary and critical theory.) It shows the multiple ways in which concepts of modernization, modernity, and the modern have been deployed, be it to establish the Holocaust’s paradigmatic or normative character, or the reverse. It illustrates the paradoxical character of efforts to highlight the Holocaust’s distinctiveness while harnessing it to a pervasive and generic “modernity.”

In this chapter, I explore the intersection of spatiality and postcolonial literary writing through a focus on African literatures, broadly speaking, and the practices of worlding therein. Both as a market category and as a subset of what is variously termed ’world literature’ or ’postcolonial literature’, African literary writing offers a rich case study of the ways in which literature functions not merely as a passive repository of space or site of spatial representation, but as a driver of the constitution and performance of space itself. In this manner, the literary functions not as discrete or autonomous but through its entanglements with broader material, social, and ideological circuits. To do so, this chapter begins with an overview of postcolonial spatiality before moving to questions of aesthetics, form, publicness, and circulation to consider the diverse and sometimes divergent ways in which the performance of spatiality in African literary writing operates across uneven and asymmetrically loaded networks of production and distribution. The chapter ultimately argues that differential performances of spatiality in various bodies of African writing demonstrate the ways in which practices of worlding remain mediated by the material, structural, and systemic constitution of literature.

As a theology student in North Wales, Gerard Manley Hopkins immersed himself in Welsh landscapes and the Welsh language; in so doing, he developed his distinctive poetic idiom. Yet Hopkins’s responses to Wales are also charged with political and psychological complexities. Wales has a deep, contested history of invention and reinvention, and Hopkins is part of a tradition of writers who have performed identity against the backdrop of an ideological Welsh landscape. Hopkins’s bardic nom de plume, ‘Brân Maenefa’ – the name with which he signed ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ – has often been understood as a jest, but it is better understood as a psychic-aesthetic identity, one whose performance gave Hopkins permission to pursue a poetic vocation. Wales was Hopkins’s ‘mother of Muses’ because he required Wales, and in a sense created Wales, as a m/otherland that, by virtue of its alterity, could mother-forth a unique poetic identity.