The India Office and the Strangers' Home worked in concert to relieve and repatriate Indians even as the former argued publicly that it was under no obligation to provide them with financial assistance. Although many upper-caste Indians lived in humble economic circumstances in their own country, authorities in Britain tended to regard them inherently as a respectable class. This was particularly the case with brahmans. Perhaps the most famous beneficiary of the bias toward brahmans was Pandita Ramabai, even though she neither qualified at the time as destitute nor supported caste distinctions. Ramabai's sojourn in England began in 1883 when she travelled there to study medicine. By 1907 cases of destitute Punjabi litigants in Britain were rare. The Land Alienation Act and the end of the famine of the 1890s had helped to minimise the dislocation attending British land reforms.

This chapter presents a narrative and formal comparative analysis of two short stories of the Books of Blood, that is 'The Midnight Meat Train' and 'Dread', and their comic and film adaptations. Clive Barker was involved as a producer in the making of both films. With all the tribulations surrounding the theatrical release of The Midnight Meat Train and the limited release of Dread, these two endorsements for the films' home distribution remain one of the best ways to prompt people to see them. Instead of focusing on the character's emotional state, Barker carefully expresses Leon Kaufman's fear and horror through repetitive references to his gaze. This chapter shows how the comic books and cinema were able to exploit the full potential of their own features in order to render Barker's powerful writing style and strong imagery.

Allen Ginsberg’s entrance into Columbia University in 1943, through to his graduation in 1948, constitute a key phase in his evolution as poet and inerasable presence in the Beat Movement. The classes he takes there with key teachers such as Lionel Trilling become essential even as he develops familiarity with the Manhattan of Greenwich Village, East Harlem, the galleries, jazz, café culture, and the darker reaches of Times Square and 42nd Street. While at Columbia he experiences his celebrated Blake vision and meets Lucien Carr, Herbert Huncke, David Kammerer, Henri Cru, and, essentially, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Briefly expelled from Columbia, with a brief stint in the maritime service which takes him to West Africa, he returns to the university and embarks even more fully on the career which will lead to “Howl” and his standing as Beat legendary name.

The seven decades of Allen Ginsberg’s life and poetic work coincided with major changes in societies’ approaches to the mentally ill. Mid century, near rock-bottom in this difficult evolution, Allen burst onto the scene with “Howl” and then “Kaddish”. Allen’s shocking and monumental works said we need to face mental illness and madness, stop seeing them as apart from ourselves, find spiritual meaning, take risks, and make major changes to humanize our approaches. With the approval of Allen and later his estate, I could conduct new research to bring us closer to Allen and Naomi’s lifelong involvement with madness and mental illness and why it matters in relation to his poetry. The result was Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness (2023). Allen’s radical acceptance of madness as a basic and potentially beneficial human capacity was far ahead of his time in inviting readers to change how we understand and engage with madness and mental illness.

This chapter highlights rhetorical strategies by which European colonizing nations regularly construed their ties with overseas colonies as organic, natural and beneficial. The examples of Britain, France and Portugal reveal biological metaphors describing national/imperial relationships and spaces to have constituted an 'international language of the colonizers'. Home to multi-ethnic citizenries, postcolonial nations contain substantial minorities descended from migrant groups hailing from erstwhile colonies. As in Britain starting in the 1960s, however, Portugal and France also enacted legislation to curb the immigration of ex-colonized people from the 1970s onwards. All three former metropoles made space for European-descended settlers and repatriates after decolonization, with France and Portugal receiving hundreds of thousands of pieds-noirs from Algeria and retornados from Angola and Mozambique respectively.

This chapter assesses the relationship between Theodore Roosevelt's rhetoric justifying the USA's imperial civilizing mission and his articulation of a set of principles. His principles outlines the nation's responsibility to protest international humanitarian atrocities by nominally civilized powers and, in extreme cases, act to prevent them. It focuses on Roosevelt's 1904 Address to Congress, which contained the clearest public expression of his creed of ethical interventionism. Roosevelt's principles of intervention in response to crimes against civilization, regardless of whether they occurred within the US sphere of influence or not, constituted a second corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In some ways, Roosevelt's second corollary was motivated by similar concerns to his first: a dislike for disorder. It is a belief that the USA's newly acquired power brought with it fresh responsibilities and a commitment to spreading civilization, of which he considered the USA to be the principal agent.

The chapter offers a contextualization of Ginsberg’s interest and models in French, identifying the key influential figures whose overt (for Rimbaud) or more subtle (for Perse) influences as role and poetic models are traceable in Ginsberg’s early Columbia year journals and the search for his own voice and poetic form. French intertexts in Ginsberg’s early journals then contextualize the emergence of Rimbaud and Perse as role models for both lifestyle and poetics, while intertextual echoes provide some hypotheses as to these poets’ influence. As Ginsberg carefully recorded his life as a poet, lectured, or signaled his influences, method, and technique, peritexts are useful lenses to observe both the construction of Ginsberg’s claimed, asserted, or archived French poetry influences. This chapter will address the reshaping, interpreting, and molding of this material into a language and graft of his own, a personal cosmology, of epic dimension, that would imprint most of his long poems.

In this chapter, 'rhetoric' is taken as the public expression of colonial 'doctrine', which might also be informed by a wider and more abstract conception of 'discourse'. To these overlapping but not interchangeable terms, a fourth term is added, which is that of 'myth', used in two contrasting but, it is proposed, mutually reinforcing senses. First, in one of the founding texts in the historiography of French decolonization, D. Bruce Marshall refers to a French colonial myth. Second, in order to develop the powerful concept of myth, the authors turn to a reading of Roland Barthes' Mythologies (1957). The dilettante, sometimes playful, one might say apolitical, Barthes functions here both as theoretician and as contemporary witness, albeit a dubiously reliable one.

Some people are taught that Allen Ginsberg’s most famous poem “Howl” was written spontaneously in a form inspired by Walt Whitman, was read in its entirety for the first time at a well-documented performance at the 6 Gallery, and that Ginsberg was brought to trial because of the ideas in his poem relating to homosexuality. This essay argues that “Howl” was heavily crafted after being simultaneously influenced by the form of Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno” and the language of Jack Kerouac’s mind-thought prose, that probably only a draft of Part I of “Howl” was first read at the 6 Gallery, and that Lawrence Ferlinghetti was tried in court for publishing specific “filthy” words – some represented by dots – in Howl and Other Poems. What we can learn about all the discrepancies and myths is that Beat Studies scholars need to be open to questioning what we have previously accepted as facts.

This chapter analyzes a series of legal events involving Britain's internal outsiders that unfolded in 1753: the sensational disappearance and reappearance of Elizabeth Canning. It describes the passage and repeal of the Jewish Naturalization Act which would have allowed Parliament to naturalize individual Jewish men if they secured the passage of a private Act of Parliament. The chapter also describes the execution of Archibald Cameron, a Scottish Jacobite who helped to plan the aborted Elibank Plot. The legal proceedings in the chapter includes: two criminal cases, involving Elizabeth Canning and Mary Squires, a Gypsy, an Act of Parliament, and a Jacobite plan for a failed rebellion. Each involved at least one person or a group defined as other: women, Gypsies, Jews, and Scottish Jacobites. The ideology of the rule of law offered a way to organize the hostility to difference within a framework of accommodation built into an imperial enterprise.

The police represented dogs as a modern scientific investigative technology which could help to negotiate dealings between rulers and ruled on terms of the authorities' choosing. Ethnographies indicate that dogs occupied an ambiguous position in the beliefs of many African communities in early twentieth-century South Africa. Black South Africans undoubtedly experienced police dogs' 'smelling out' of alleged 'criminals' as oppressive. Members of Parliament with large farming constituencies repeatedly demanded more extensive use of police dogs in the 1920s, whereas in the immediate post-Union period the topic had occasioned mainly back-bench mirth in the House of Assembly. The discourse of modernity legitimating the canine programme rested ultimately on two irrationalities governing state institutional action itself. The short cut to satisfactory outcomes that the canine ritual facilitated thus represented an effective qualification of bureaucratic instrumentality's colonisation of early twentieth-century South African society.