American intellectuals traditionally criticized “lowbrow” popular culture as a societal detriment when immigration and rising working-class culture concerned the elite. In the 1940s, the Frankfurt School of Marxist philosophers perpetuated such disdain for popular culture as the ruling class’s weapon for keeping the workers distracted from political realities. After World War II, many scholars reversed course and celebrated popular culture as democratic American consensus. But the social upheavals of the 1960s influenced the next generation of intellectuals, drawn to popular culture for how it might express social resistance. A new international model supporting this approach was Marxist-influenced British Cultural Studies, led by Stuart Hall, that embraced popular culture as capable of either social domination or resistance. Since then, feminist, ethnic, and queer studies critiques as well as acknowledgment of popular culture’s global reach and transnational flow have influenced pop culture theories and methods.

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.

Beginning with Wizard of the Crow, I argue that Ngugi radicalises the original concept of the novel by situating oral performance at the centre of the scribal narrative genre. The consequence is an epic that is at once the globalisation of an African artistic practice through the appropriation and reinvention of the novel tradition, while addressing critical issues around the politics of dictatorship, rumours, exile and globalisation. By exploiting his childhood and youth memory through a trilogy, Ngugi demonstrates aliveness to the cause of total artistic rendition. This is dramatised by the sense in which wider insights into his oeuvre attain sophisticated vent between fact and fiction in the recollection of the tensions between colonial violence and growth. Although The Perfect Nine is a commitment to myth-making and remaking, it doubles as an treatise on the necessity of environmental conservation. Anchored to multi-species justice, it illustrates mythology’s relevance in the present and justifies its amenability to continual reinvention. Taking Globalectics as representative, the chapter reflects on Ngugi’s transition from the discourse of nationalism to dismantling hierarchies in the production, circulation and reception of world literature by writing against linguistic feudalism. Central to the apparent shift is the primacy of context as informed by the dynamics of the twenty-first century.

The introduction seeks to provide bold outlines of Ngugi’s complex contexts and point to how these offer new paths to his fiction. While acknowledging that scant attention has been paid to the context in which Ngugi’s works are produced, we are also seeking to understand how this context has been mediated by Ngugi’s discourse. To do this is to suggest that Ngugi as a writer of praxis also generates his context and enters into dialogue with familial and historical events, intellectual climate and other layers of institutional practices that have helped him disrupt received knowledges and histories. The contexts, far from offering some objective and reified source of knowledge, are an engagement with a society and historical moment in flux and in need of reinterpretation. One aim of this introduction is to displace our notion of context as a reified site of retrieval; another is to see how context offers readers a handle on new and disruptive ways of rereading Ngugi’s texts. I argue that contexts, whether one is thinking of family, mission education or Mau Mau emergency and related colonial experiences, are not muted sites of knowledge, nor are they self-evident sources of meaning and meaning-making, but a seething site of creativity and meaning-making.

In the 1820s, newspapers, religious tracts, pamphlets, magazines, and books became available in vast, affordable quantities to Americans across all classes. This print revolution occurred because of expanding literacy rates, new industrial technologies for mass production, population growth, new transportation modes for wider distribution, and the new Jacksonian ideology of populist democracy. Fiction became especially popular in book form and serialized in magazines and newspapers. After the Civil War, the publishing industry consolidated, and an efficient, interlocked network of syndicates, subscription sales, and door-to-door salesmen popularized the leading authors of the day. Perhaps more germane to the “democratizing” role of nineteenth-century publishing were the penny press and the dime novel. Each offered newspapers or books for cheap prices, making their literature available to urban working classes. This rich, diverse volume of nineteenth-century print culture established the dynamics of American popular culture.

Graph bootstrap percolation is a discrete-time process capturing the spread of a virus on the edges of Kn. Given an initial set G ⊆ Kn of infected edges, the transmission of the virus is governed by a fixed graph H: in each round of the process, any edge e of Kn that is the last uninfected edge in a copy of H in Kn gets infected as well. Once infected, edges remain infected forever. The process was introduced by Bollobás in 1968 in the context of weak saturation and has since inspired a vast array of beautiful mathematics. The main focus of this survey is the extremal question of how long the infection process can last before stabilising. We give an exposition of our recent systematic study of this maximum running time and the inuence of the infection rule H. The topic turns out to possess a wide variety of interesting behaviour, with connections to additive, extremal, and probabilistic combinatorics. Along the way, we encounter a number of surprises and attractive open problems.

In this chapter, I test the book’s first two hypotheses regarding which leaders contribute to regional security operations and receive support from co-members in return. I expect that leaders with the greatest need for RIOs’ protective benefits – heads of state facing high coup risk – are the most motivated to remain in good standing with co-members who are able to intervene on their side during security crises. In statistical analyses at the RIO-state-year level of analysis, I find that leaders most prone to irregular removal through coups are indeed more likely to deploy security personnel in support of co-members. The chapter also presents tests of the second hypothesis derived from the theory: that leaders who contribute personnel to support RIO co-members increase their odds of receiving protection. Quantitative tests again provide evidence consistent with the theory. The RIO co-members are more likely to deploy troops in support of leaders with prior records of security cooperation in these four RIOs with mutual defense pacts.

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.

Chapter 1 outlines how mental models – cognitive frameworks for interpreting the political economy – shape policy preferences. It contrasts the Economist Mental Model (EMM), marked by a strong grasp of fundamental economic concepts and economic reasoning tools, with Alternative Mental Models (AMMs), which lack systematic economic reasoning. Equipped with tools like cost–benefit analysis, EMM adopters recognize intertemporal trade-offs, possible positive-sum outcomes, and distributional impacts, aligning decisions more effectively with aggregate welfare. In contrast, AMM users focus on immediate, visible effects and often adopt zero-sum thinking, leading to policies that cater to short-term priorities but diminish aggregate welfare over time. Crucially, Chapter 1 stresses that the EMM does not imply different values; rather, it shapes how individuals perceive trade-offs. The chapter also predicts that those with the EMM are more likely to update their views based on new economic information, while AMM users often rely on simplified cues, reinforcing existing misconceptions.

Chapter 1 introduces the book’s central puzzle: why some electoral management bodies earn public trust and develop real autonomy while others remain vulnerable to manipulation. It argues that formal institutional design alone cannot explain cross-national variation. Instead, de facto autonomy emerges through political negotiation, transparency, accountability practices, and structured partisan engagement. Drawing on fieldwork, elite interviews, and archival research across Latin America and Africa, the chapter outlines a new theoretical framework centered on partisan inclusion within administrative processes that can foster legitimacy, reduce uncertainty, and strengthen electoral integrity. The chapter also introduces the book’s cross-regional comparative strategy, explains case selection, and previews how the empirical chapters illustrate the mechanisms through which party consultation, institutional sequencing, and administrative practices jointly shape election quality. The chapter positions the book within broader debates on democratic resilience, institutional trust, and the conditions under which electoral authorities acquire real independence.

For Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the crises of post-independence Africa cannot be understood without an understanding of neo-colonialism as a political dynamic that sabotaged the freedom dreams of Africa and the Global South at large. This chapter reflects on neo-colonialism as a framework for understanding his insights on postcolonial African realities. I locate Ngugi’s views on neo-colonialism within the context of his dynamic intellectual biography, tracking the range of factors, agents, institutions and events that were instrumental in shaping his views of neo-colonialism and the postcolonial crises that haunt us – a core concern across his oeuvre. The first section of this chapter tracks the influences and trajectories of thought that shaped Ngugi’s views on the postcolonial context as a neo-colonial one. Section two turns to the imprint of postcolonial crises and neo-colonialism in Ngugi’s writing, noting the centrality of gender and the family in codifying his critique of postcolonial states as systems in the grip of neo-colonial control. The closing section underscores the continued relevance of Ngugi’s perspectives on neo-colonialism in making sense of contemporary postcolonial realities, through a brief exploration of the extractive impulse behind the romance of digital labour, as the latest iteration in neoliberal capital’s lengthy extractivist approach to African lifeworlds.