Chapter 2 tells the story of how ethnicity came to be known in Kenya through territory, providing an overview of the history of ethnic territorial boundary drawing from its inception with the first colonial administration, to today. The principal motivation for the earliest hard boundaries between purportedly homogenous ethnic groups was to free up land for white settlement and capital accumulation. After independence, the administrative boundaries of provinces and districts were deliberately retained, and ethnic patterns of land settlement were engineered. With multi-party elections in the 1990s, these established ‘ethnic territories’ motivated electoral gerrymandering, the most significant postcolonial driver of ethnic territorialisation. All these practices cemented a profound connection between land, boundaries, identity, rights, power, and security. I show how the 2010 constitution worked within this paradigm, too, but in novel ways that moved toward vagueness to manage the inflammatory, grievance-based politics tethered to boundary drawing in Kenya. In doing so, I show how ethnic territorial population concentration today is less certain than commonly imagined.

This chapter examines the enumeration of ethnic populations in the census, where ‘the tribe question’ has been included since 1948. I trace its evolution – from its origins as self-evidently important with a self-evident list of groups – through numerous changes up to 2019. The powerful social imaginary of ‘42+ tribes’ comes from the 1969 census, despite the numerous changes since then. I show how changes in classifications over time, as well as the way they have been used and narrated by the state, reveal the multiple political purposes of classifying and counting ethnicity. In the colonial period, this centred on ethnic population distribution to support indirect rule via ethnicity, as well as tax collection and labour control. In the postcolonial period, ethnic demographic posturing for electoral purposes or ‘the tyranny of numbers’ became a major driver of interest in ‘the tribe question’. However, since 2009, the census has also been a site of recognition for minorities and of the painting of a portrait of a nation defined by its diversity. In this chapter, I also show how the quintessentially unambiguous nature of ethnic census codes has been rendered ambiguous in useful ways.

This chapter theorises ethnicity as a mode of thought and identification around which ways of being, acting and relating are organised. It is one among many possible anchors for identification, solidarity and difference, though it is the most prominent in Kenya. I discuss how this became so, describing identity and community before colonialism, and offering a history of how ethnicity organised social life under and after colonial rule, especially around elections. I provide a sketch of varied ethnic identifications in Kenya, demonstrating immense variety, not all of which obviously fit an ethnic framework, and many of which entail politics quite different from the ‘big 5’ which dominate studies of elections. Finally, I situate the case of Kenya in a comparative context, highlighting key features of how ethnic classification has operated in Kenya, including reification, colonial penetration, nationhood, demography, and differences between direct and diffuse effects of identification. This section shows that both ethnicity and its classification can be conducive to pluralism and solidarity in Kenya, but perhaps not in other contexts.

The land now called Australia was settled by humans between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago, and the lands and waterways sustained balanced life until 1788 when a fleet of British soldiers, settlers and convicts landed on the central east coast. This chapter traces the ways theatrical works stage ‘land’ that has been transformed and depleted by the interrelated actions of colonialism, deforestation and pastoralism. It features the ecological content and staging of three works: Yanagai! Yanagai! by Yorta Yorta and Gunaikurnai woman Andrea James (2003), Louis Nowra’s (1985) The Golden Age and The White Earth by Andrew McGahan and Shaun Charles (2009). These depict violent land-grabs violent land-grabs, massacres, stubborn farming practices and ignorance of the environment as an ecosystem with a long history of human habitation. This chapter looks at the problem of ongoing ecological damage and struggles to develop sustainable land practices.

Chapter 5 looks at political communities in the making and historicises the notion of citizenship status during and after colonialism. In Ghana, citizenship criteria have evolved from a combination of jus soli and jus sanguinis principles to a purely jus sanguinis principle, as if to compensate for the porous nature of Ghana’s borders. This evolution shows a tendency to render citizenship more exclusionary, and more dependent on filiation and indigeneity, creating other boundaries within the nation. Yet the unsystematic and deficient systems of documentation prior and after independence cannot provide proof of one’s status with certainty. This is why new nations (such as Ghana) and local communities end up using the principle of indigeneity to prove their legitimacy to belong. This chapter suggests that indigeneity and citizenship constitute each other and that those who belong are those who can convince of the indigeneity of their ancestors. These narratives of indigeneity being prone to contestation, citizenship is at the same time at risk of being undermined. This implies that local belonging and citizenship can easily be conflated.

This chapter analyses the historical transformation from ritualistic and therapeutic use of mind-altering substances to their global regulation and criminalisation. Focusing on the colonial and industrial eras, it highlights how opium, coca, and alcohol were recontextualised as economic commodities and instruments of empire. The chapter tracks the emergence of international drug control regimes, moral panics, and racialised legislation — particularly the British Opium Wars, US Harrison Narcotics Act, and global treaties. The intersection of state regulation, corporate profit, and public health is critically examined through case studies including the US opioid crisis. In parallel, sugar and caffeine are discussed as ‘soft’ stimulants that escaped moral scrutiny despite their neurochemical effects. The chapter concludes with a comparative look at regulation and commodification, showing how different substances became entangled in legal, moral, and economic narratives.

This chapter explores the rise of the graphic narrative in Africa – starting with cartoons and comic strips and culminating in contemporary graphic novels and popular comics series. It outlines three key historical developments in the genre. It further argues that comic strips were vehicles for the colonial enterprise: they occurred in colonial journals and magazines in the 1930s/1940s and reflected colonial ideology through mimicry and racial stereotype. Second, cartoons and comics became important tools in anticolonial movements, such as in Nigeria in the 1950s/1960s and apartheid-era South Africa from the 1950s to the 1980s. Cartoons turned satire and mockery back on the colonizer, while comics were used to subvert the visual language of colonial oppression and to encourage resistance. Finally, didactic comics and graphic narratives (pamphlets, posters, and free-standing albums) have formed part of government policy and development work from the 1990s to the present day. This history has informed present day production. Contemporary graphic narratives combine rich local visual traditions with global trends to negotiate identity, politics, and social change. The chapter ends by examining four examples of more “serious” graphic novels, histories, and memoirs that are indicative, rather than representative, of the diversity of contemporary production.

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.

This chapter uncovers the emergence and early history of the terms folk song and folk music in English during the nineteenth century as they circulated across the Atlantic and around the globe. One person in particular was responsible for this discourse: the prolific author and translator Mary Howitt. I show that these terms initially emerged in direct reference to the German Volkslieder, though they were not associated explicitly with the work of Johann Gottfried Herder nor with any particular nation or region. I use this material to argue that folk music was neither a repertoire nor an idiom, but rather an idea conditioned by Romantic thought. Indeed, it was the concept of folk music that most enchanted writers during this period – writers who were never of the folk they depicted. These terms are a nostalgic reply or retort to the interlaced revolutions and encounters that have defined modernity. Ultimately, this history exemplifies a long intellectual struggle in the West over the meaning and musical significance of working-class culture, nature, time, and colonial alterity.

In the debate on the impact of multinationals on society, the “labor question” has occupied a prominent role for many decades. Surveying this debate, the chapter starts by outlining the main challenges posed by multinationals, in particular with regard to their ability to continuously reshape their production geographies. The main part of the chapter addresses two core issues. First, it provides a literature survey on the labor impact of multinationals, distinguishing between the Global South where the impact of multinationals occurred in the wider context of colonialism and, later, decolonization, and the Global North where discussion of the “labor question” revolved around issues of offshoring and labor relations practices. In the second part, the chapter analyzes the role of organized labor (especially trade unions) in multinationals, placing equal emphasis on domestic strategies and efforts to establish transnational bodies for interest representation.

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.

Folk music discourses have long held a complex relationship to colonialism. Definitions of colonialism – or the occupation and exploitation of one land by a dominant power – have usually been formulated through the voices of Western colonisers (or those educated within their intellectual traditions). Discourses on folk music have likewise shied away from post-colonial studies, reinforcing Victorian ideas of folk music as a natural art form that somehow exists separately from other, less static or rooted, musical ecosystems. This chapter explores the themes of (1) folk music as a post-colonial alternative to ‘cancel culture’, (2) folk music as a racialised category, and (3) strategies and possibilities for folk music’s decolonial futures. Focusing on British ideologies around the folk, I advocate for placing folk music into a critical dialogue with decolonial and Indigenous systems of knowledge that have the capacity to shift the power dynamics of these discussions away from racialized hierarchies.

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.

Chapter 1 sets the historical backdrop to the Green Revolution. First, it chronicles why the Green Revolution was deemed necessary in the first place, most notably due to the lack of technological breakthrough in rice production and the related meager public support for food-crop agriculture. Through this exploration, the chapter demonstrates the instructive point that the politicization of rice did not begin with the Green Revolution. Instead, it has a long history. But previous attempts at boosting paddy yields, for example, for a variety of reasons had failed. The chapter is arranged by case study. It starts with a careful look at pre-Green Revolution developments in the Philippines, followed by Malaya/Malaysia, and Indonesia. The narrative is organized chronologically within each section, which roughly starts with the early 20th century under colonialism and ends with the early independence period in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The chapter analyzes folk music and performance practices in a contemporary Indian and South Asian context. It covers the meaning and deployment of the term ‘folk’, its wider implications relating to caste, class, and taste, as well as its status in existing practices and scholarship. Whereas colonialists saw folk song as part of the enterprise to understand indigenous minds to better control and administer them, nationalists viewed it as a great resource to reconstruct the nation. After India’s independence, the state along with its middle class tried to institutionalize and appropriate folk song to cater to their tastes, however, it remained largely outside of their control and continues to maintain local and communitarian connections. Adopting a decolonial perspective, this chapter also addresses local hierarchies based on caste and cultural dispossession. Finally, it views folk song and music both as part of everyday life as well as a critique of everyday life that opens up an emancipatory discourse for the future.