Abstract: This chapter argues that the state of nature brings into focus colonial imaginaries of land and identity. It also contends that these colonial imaginaries have come to shape the modern West more broadly.

Dehlvi’s 1914 memoir raises the possibility that the women of the Meerut were not bazaar prostitutes but “women whose men had been imprisoned” – “respectable” women, wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. Building on this clue, this chapter asks who were these women, why were they at the cantonment, and how did they regard the British? For answers, this chapter turns to “family pension” records from the 1850s. What emerges are soldiers’ family relationships and, from the British point of view, their scandalous nature. British “Pension Paymasters” came to argue that many bereaved women receiving pensions were not what they claimed to be, namely, war widows. Official distrust of such women grew dramatically in the mid-1850s, largely based on a narrowing definition in the official mind of what constituted legitimate marriage. The result was the denial of pensions to these women and, not infrequently, their criminal prosecution, especially in the region of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, whose marriages were deemed insufficiently legitimate. Pension fraud investigations also revealed, in the western reaches around Delhi, the Punjab, and Afghanistan, secondary marriages to younger women.

This chapter begins its discussion of Australian poetry in the decades immediately following World War II, post-Ern Malley hoax. It identifies the impulse in major poets of this time to establish a canon of Australian poetry that reinforced a strong sense of settler identity. The chapter reflects upon this expansionary period of Australian literary culture, as evidenced by the growth of Australian publishers, literary magazines, government support for the arts, professional networks, and forums for the discussion of poetry. It considers canon-building manoeuvres in light of a deep divide between conservative and left-wing viewpoints. The role of Douglas Stewart and Beatrice Davis, and Angus & Robertson’s Australian Poets Series, is detailed. The chapter also describes the expansion of Australian literary studies as underpinned by the growth of tertiary education. It discusses how a number of poets assumed elevated university positions, encouraging scholarly accounts and criticism of poetry. Lastly, the chapter concludes that the advent of Oodgeroo’s work presented a formidable challenge to this mid century envisioning of a national canon.

This chapter considers the work of major First Nations figures in Australian poetry – Oodgeroo, Kevin Gilbert, Mudrooroo and Lionel Fogarty – as well as poetry produced by current or former First Nations inmates of Australia’s prison system or about First Nations deaths in custody. The language of these poets is both politically activist and community enhancing. It argues that the effects of such poetry can be redemptive, empowering or visionary. It considers such poetry as testimony, discussing the ways in which First Nations writers have created a poetic language that might not have been available, which, in turn, creates a community of readers and listeners. For many First Nations prison inmates, poetry becomes a mean to ground Indigenous identity and reflect on their lives and relationships. From the 1990s, poets such as Samuel Wagan Watson, Romaine Moreton, Ali Cobby Eckermann and Yvette Holt have broken new ground with work highlighting Aboriginal selfhood in an evolving Australian society. The chapter concludes with a consideration of a younger and emergent generation of First Nations poets.

This chapter discusses poets of the South West Asian and North African diasporas who have experienced exile and loss, some as refugees. It describes a translingual pluriverse of diasporic poets from a region that has come to have many names and terminologies assigned to it. The chapter reflects on the political and cultural conditions in which diasporic writers produce poetry in Australia, in both spoken and written forms. Themes of witness, protest and identity, often interwoven, are analysed. The chapter considers the presence of poets from Arabic-, Kurdish-, Dari- and Farsi-speaking backgrounds, some of whom write in English while others have translingual practices and experiment with hybrid modes. It assesses the impact of settler monolingualism in Australia and argues for the importance of multilingual poetry in articulating cultural diversity and challenging delimiting discursive systems. The significance of literary journals is also detailed, and the value of poetry in the face of violence, displacement and prejudice is asserted.

A paradox of the current era is that people living in advanced economies commonly struggle with finding a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives despite the unprecedented political, economic, and medical advances that have given them more freedom and opportunity to pursue long-term goals of their own choosing. How do we explain this affluence–purpose paradox – why aren’t more people taking advantage of the unprecedented benefits of modernity to choose and pursue meaningful and fulfilling goals? This chapter provides a broad-strokes review of possible explanations for this enigma and then focuses on the sociological concept of anomie, namely the deficits and conflictual nature of societal norms in modern societies. This sociological concept is framed in terms of contrasts between current identity societies and premodern role societies. This contrast is illustrated with a focus on the transition to adulthood, a critical period during which people now need to individually cope with the normative deficits of modernity as they form adult identities. The chapter concludes by pointing to policy directions for how identity societies can compensate for the normative deficits of modernity, thereby supporting people to take advantage of the affluence that modernity affords.

Religious beliefs are a profound source of motivation and purpose for many people. This is especially true of fundamentalists of different faiths, who strive to strictly adhere to what they believe to be scriptural guidance for how to live their lives. However, given the high rates of religious illiteracy across American citizens, belief in a religion does not necessarily indicate knowledge of the contents of one’s religious teachings. Perhaps as a consequence, people belonging to the same religion, and the clergy who guide them, have used different aspects of the scriptures to express divergent viewpoints (for and against slavery, homophobia, violence, etc.). The complexity of religious scriptures and interpretations across history has meant that members of religions who have sought to follow the righteous path have, at times, been taught that expressing bias against certain groups is the virtuous thing to do. As such, religion has been used to justify strategic beliefs (based on power and political motives) which then become fused with religious identity in private beliefs and public discourse. This chapter addresses how the noble purpose associated with being a virtuous person can be reclaimed from the forces that exploit the power of religion to create division and discord. We call on people to educate themselves about the content and context of various religious scriptures, to value diversity and avoid bias, and to cultivate spiritual and intellectual humility.

Self-discovery characterizes the late teens and early twenties. Accordingly, many young people turn to colleges and universities – with their expansive resources for occupational, ideological, and interpersonal exploration – to help them clarify who they are and where they are going in life. Although changes in identity and self-direction are normative, perhaps even expected, parts of one’s journey through college, people vary in their ability to find threads of continuity within themselves in the face of change. This leaves many of them feeling unstable and disconnected from the people they were in the past. A sense of being “off-course” in life is known as derailment and is consistently related to elevated levels of concurrent psychological distress. As demand for mental health services on college campuses rises across the nation, derailment represents a potentially salient experience that can help educators and practitioners better address the developmental needs of their students. In this chapter, I review the features of emerging adulthood before unpacking derailment and what it could mean within the landscape of this period. Then, against the backdrop of existing identity and purpose formation literature, I explore the alignment between current United States (US) college structures and the developmental needs of students, theorizing on how traditional institutional policies, practices, and opportunities encourage or discourage derailment during a student’s tenure. Finally, I close by looking ahead to the future, calling for empirical investigation of how higher education can support young people in finding a balance between maintaining personal stability and undergoing radical personal change.

For many (if not most) artists, their work is a key part of who they are. Their creative efforts help shape their identity and how they see themselves in the world. It is not just the generic notion of “being an artist,” but rather their specific field, style, and project that define their self-concept. Some discuss the parallels between creating art and creating an identity; both involve generating different possible ideas and ultimately choosing the best one. They also talk about the process of learning to think of themselves as artists.

Our focus on digital interaction in the history of English foregrounds the mutually transformative relationship between language and society, with technological affordances enabling (new) forms of social interaction, whilst impeding or remediating (older) communication practices. Early internet forum users maximised meaning-making with available linguistic resources, including pre-digital typographical and respelling practices. Today, within the diversity of digital Englishes, strategies typical of early digital interaction remain, reconfigured for users’ local language ideologies and community norms and expanded to incorporate multilingual practices and new semiotic modes. This chapter explores the sociopragmatic practices of identity and belonging across the digital age, from Usenet in the 1980s and SMS in the 2000s to Twitter in the 2020s, detailing a complex interplay between new communicative opportunities and long-established sociopragmatic practices originating offline. Our analysis points to a diversification of English-using internet users and an expansion of multilingual, multimodal repertoires which prompt a revisiting of traditional sociolinguistic conceptions of English.

Social networks are a valuable object of investigation in historical sociolinguistics, as they can contribute both to the onset of change and to the maintenance of linguistic norms. However, their characteristics make them complex to analyse, as their intrinsic variability may hinder the identification of phenomena that span different networks across time and space. This chapter is focused on Late Modern English materials, to present new resources through which network contiguities can be studied; this is the case, for instance, with the exchanges of emigrants, political activists, scholars and business correspondents. After addressing a few methodological issues, the chapter presents an overview of the materials at hand and outlines how networks and coalitions have had an impact, not only on the usage of participants (as shown in recent studies) but also on how language has been perceived, described and codified.

How can we make up our minds on whether or not international organizations are different from the sum of their parts? Taking a step back from doctrinal analysis, this chapter explores how the challenges that international lawyers have faced in that regard correspond to broader themes in philosophical discourse on ontological reductionism. This chapter suggests that questions of existence are inherently relative in the sense that they only make sense when considered in relation to other entities that are already admitted as non-redundant. Thus, the key to assessing the distinctiveness of international organizations is to first uncover the rationale that international law employs in buttressing their members as ‘real’ entities and then examine whether it can be equally applied to international organizations.

This chapter describes the procedure for cessie van goede (L. cessio bonorum), the legal solution utilized by the majority of insolvents in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. It is based upon a qualitative analysis of more than 250 unique cases. Even though the local authorities vigilantly guarded their power to approve or deny the granting of cessie to their citizens after consulting the creditors involved, it was very rarely denied in practice. Cessie allowed an insolvent to escape debt imprisonment, in exchange for handing over all his or her possessions to be sold for the benefit of the creditors. The identity of the applicants for cessie will be analyzed in contrast with the characteristics of the accord population that was discussed in Chapter 5 of this book. The main factors that were provided by the applicants as an explanation for their financial demise are categorized and critically examined. It will be shown that through cessie van goede, many Amsterdam insolvents gathered sufficient trust and reputation to attempt to restart their businesses.