This introductory chapter provides a rationale for the study of Allen Ginsberg and his poetry while outlining the major themes, issues, and motivations of the volume. Ginsberg is an essential figure in twentieth-century US poetics. His work is an important part of the larger turn from “closed” to “open” verse forms in the postwar period, and his role as perhaps the major countercultural figure in the 1960s and 1970s meant that his work garnered an international audience. The goal of this volume is to provide readers with the context necessary to understand how Ginsberg’s life and interests shaped his work; how his work, in its turn, entered the greater poetic discourse of the time; and finally, how Ginsberg sought to influence not just American but indeed global political and cultural realities of the postwar period. Taking a broadly chronological approach, this volume charts the wide variety of contexts crucial to understanding not just Ginsberg, his writing, and his career, but many of the larger trends of the long twentieth century as well.

Chapter 6 concludes the book by turning the lens to exiled dissidents to contextualize the impact of emigrants’ departures. Unlike emigrants, who may hold opposing views but depart voluntarily without government involvement, dissidents are often pressured or coerced to leave their countries of origin because of their opposition to the government and its policies. As organizers of democratic movements, they offer a unique perspective about the cumulative effect of people’s emigration over time. Based on two dozen interviews with activists from across the Middle East several years after the Arab uprisings, the chapter tells their stories and demonstrates what their loss has meant to the pro-democratic movements they left behind. Through their narratives, the extent to which their political agendas rely on rank-and-file supporters who are also positioned to emigrate can be discerned. The chapter concludes by considering the political and policy implications of Democratic Drain.

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.

Did Victorian literature prompt political change? This chapter examines Thomas Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Cry of the Children,” both credited with bringing mass awareness to exploitative labor. But what part did they play in actually changing Victorian society? Levine argues that a single work of art, then as now, does not accomplish change unless it takes part in campaigns that are organized around three social forms: large shows of public support, sustained pressure over time, and specific, well-articulated goals. Analyzing the relations between literary and activist forms not only throws light on Victorian culture but can also help literary scholars now to engage in effective political and social struggle.

Francisco Bilbao (1823–1865) was a Chilean writer and political activist educated at the Instituto Nacional. He rose to notoriety when he published an essay, the “Sociabilidad chilena” (1844), condemning the role of both the Catholic Church and the legacies of colonialism in Chile. He was brought to trial for violating the laws regulating press freedoms. As a result, he left Chile for Europe, where he established contact with Edgar Quinet and Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais and witnessed the European revolutions of 1848. Returning to Chile, he founded the Society of Equality in 1850 and participated in the uprising of April 1851, which led to his exile in Peru, Europe, and Argentina, where he died. His principal works, in addition to “Sociabilidad,” are La América en peligro (1862), and El evangelio americano (1864). The essay included here is representative of his views regarding the radical contradiction between Catholicism and republicanism, which was in turn an expression of his views on the struggle between despotism and freedom.

This chapter reflects on the book’s exploration of drama and performance that reveal the entanglements of natural phenomena and human behaviours in society, each shaping one another in dynamic interplay. The book concludes by considering how artists continue to want to make work about anthropogenic ecological change. We suggest here that performative actions of dissent can offer shared optimistic moments. This chapter looks at the tactics of tactics of artists and activists who perform actions to physically resist, slow or block ecological damage, attempting to hold big corporations and politicians to account and keep urgent ecological issues under public scrutiny.

Chapter 8 provides a comprehensive roadmap for enabling a societal shift toward a sustainable and equitable future. Central to the argument is the need to repurpose the “invisible hand”—a metaphor for systemic incentives that currently reinforce unsustainable behaviors—into a helping force that promotes global well-being. The chapter proposes change at both the individual and institutional levels, encouraging citizens to act within their roles—whether as voters, educators, business leaders, artists, or scientists—to nudge society toward a tipping point. The chapter explores innovative governance models such as an autonomous global climate board, and even suggests taxing extreme wealth or implementing a universal basic income to mitigate inequality and systemic stress. Education and science must shift focus toward actionable, hopeful narratives, while business and media must align incentives with public good. Ultimately, the chapter frames global transformation as possible—if society can collectively shift its worldview and reshape the systems guiding human behavior.

The autobiographical act of coming out was one of the central gestures of US gay liberation. In the late 1960s and 1970s coming out was part of a new defiant way of living homosexuality and promised to transform the social world by showing how gay people were everywhere. Yet, in the period since this time, coming out has tended to be viewed much more suspiciously. For queer theory, coming out is associated with a naïve belief in subjective coherence, stable identity, and liberal personhood, all constructed or produced on the basis of suppressing both social and psychic difference. This chapter challenges this established perspective by foregrounding the wide variety of autobiographical writings in which gay men came out in this period. Far from a step into straightforward coherence, finding identity in these texts is often a fractured and fraught undertaking. The chapter covers a wide range of material, from single-author autobiographies published by mainstream presses to numerous anthologies published by grassroots initiatives. The sheer variety of texts addressed further challenges the singular narrative about coming out that has become established within queer scholarship.

Chapter 2 lays the foundation for the book’s theoretical framework by introducing the collective action problem and examining how protest mobilization unfolds in practice. Drawing on global literature and empirical examples, it demonstrates that elite-driven protest is a widespread and influential form of collective action. It shows, however, that successful elite mobilization requires deep local knowledge, strong community networks, and trust – resources that many elites lack. To overcome this gap, the chapter introduces the concept of the protest broker: an intermediary who facilitates connections between elites and potential protesters. It explores who protest brokers are, what they do, and why their role is central to protest mobilization. It argues further, that existing theories of elite mobilization implicitly assume the presence of such intermediaries, yet rarely acknowledge them explicitly. By making protest brokers visible, this chapter reframes key assumptions in the protest literature and connects them to broader research on political and vote brokers. It also situates protest brokers among other grassroots actors – such as shop floor stewards and activists – clarifying their unique but overlapping functions in enabling protest and shaping its location and form.

This chapter presents a historical survey of environmental fictions in Africa, considering the robust scholarly interests in ecocriticism. Of particular significance are the emergence of the environmental fiction genre, marked by the relocation of ecocritical concepts from North America to Africa, the transition of existing literary works to the domain of environmental fiction, an efflorescence of self-representing environmental narratives, the co-existence of fictive and non-fictive narratives, and the attendant ecocritical discourse in the present time. Considering these, African environmental fictions can be grouped into two. The first group are fictions that explicitly thematize environmental justice and declaim the eco-destructive culture of extractive industries and corporate capitalism. Writings under this category are mostly transgressive, with a sense of activism. The second group are fictions that come under revisionist ecocritical studies focused on the idea that certain narratives predating the emergence of ecocriticism lend themselves to an ecocritical reading, in that such fictions have represented human–nonhuman relations, interdependence, and multi-species presence. A further strand of this chapter pays attention to the local particularities of nations such as Nigeria and South Africa, with prominent voices in African environmental fiction, and the peculiar ecological realities represented by authors from these countries.

This chapter explores a genre of activist theatre that has developed in play texts written in the French language in countries of West Africa since 2000. This theatre in Benin, Burkina Faso, and Togo builds on the legacies of performance traditions and picks up the momentum of theatre from the post-independence era starting in the 1960s, and then the activist theatre of the 1990s. This theatre has transitioned from what it was in the twentieth century theatre as it reacts to new realities in Africa and to the redefining of global relations. West African theatermakers have rejected the European models in a literary decolonization effort. By maintaining connections to earlier African forms, contemporary playwrights in Francophone West Africa keep traditional means of storytelling alive and use these influences to write new theatre genres that diverge from those of European theatre. The chapter examines examples of plays from Francophone West Africa to highlight three components of activist playwriting: how it is political, how it is universal, and how it relates to other forms of African theatre. Finally, it approaches theatre as an activist artform in performance, considering who is engaged, and where and when this happens.

The introduction situates political writing and publishing as vital tools in articulating, disseminating, and shaping political movements and ideas in modern Britain. It explores the diversity of political genres, from elite forms such as parliamentary novels and newspaper obituaries to grassroots expressions such as punk fanzines and coalfield women’s writing. It highlights how ‘high political’ and subaltern voices respectively engaged with political writing, sometimes to reinforce dominant narratives and at other times to challenge or subvert them. It examines the gendered politics of authorship, particularly how women and marginalised groups used writing to claim authority and reshape the boundaries of political discourse. Attention is given to the role of literature and publishing in mediating the intersections of culture and politics, from fascist propaganda and socialist poetry to the intellectual infrastructure of devolved Scotland and Northern Ireland. By contextualizing political writing within broader historical and cultural transformations, the introduction positions the chapters of the book as a series of ‘core samples’ that reveal the relationships between genre, ideology, and activism.

Chapter 7 will compare how shareholders in the three countries monitor management by exit, that is, the threat of hostile takeover, from the perspective of the tradeoff between management autonomy and monitoring management. In the United States, substantial numbers of hostile takeovers have occurred since the 1970s. In Japan, hostile takeover attempts have rarely been successfully done since the majority shareholding of listed companies was stabilized by cross-shareholding networks in the 1960s. After 2020, the control market emerged with several successful hostile takeovers by competitors, and at the same time, hedge fund activism exploded. In China, hostile takeovers are still nearly absent, particularly for SOEs. Regarding the balance between management autonomy and monitoring management, the United States has a relatively buyer-friendly legal system, and Japan has a seller-friendly legal system. China has the UK-type mandatory takeover bid rule, and the black letter law looks to create a UK-type balance between autonomy and monitoring, but the actual implementation of the statutes allows abuses by both buyers and sellers.