Clive Barker explores (meta)cultural blackness and its transformative influence in many of his works, but it is perhaps never more fully and powerfully detailed than through the character of Pie 'oh' pah in Imajica. More than a project of cultural critique or personal empowerment, Barker's (meta)cultural blackness demonstrates the power of fantasy narratives to engage with and prefigure emergent forms of identity and agency. Engaging Barker's fantasies as a prime test case, the chapter argues that approaching fantasy narratives through critical race theory and other experimental frameworks of agency and identity can further mobilise the genre to participate in projects of cultural revolution. Barker's Imajica is a novel haunted by the possibility of union, of singularity. Each of its primary characters is torn from people and places that, at least imaginarily, offer the promise of authentic personhood.

Allen Ginsberg’s fastidiousness about retroactively dating three decades of his own photographs in the 1980s is a significant part of a historiographical project. Ginsberg strives to document his role in the creation of a movement that enables viewers to perceive self-portraits and individual portraits of other key Beat figures such as Kerouac as communal objects. Ginsberg’s inscriptions couple the author’s penchant for mythmaking with his interest in narrating events that are made significant through their incorporation into a composition that suggests a heightened meaning for each individual image. Collecting the ninety-one portraits in Allen Ginsberg: Photographs, placing them in a roughly chronological order, and providing information about each image through captions that feature the date of composition, the place in which the image was taken, and how each subject contributed to the Beat movement or to subsequent countercultural movements such as hippie and punk that Ginsberg regards as part of the Beat legacy, the poet displays his interest in what Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory regards as the creation of “collective memory.”

Global processes take concrete and localised forms in large cities around the world. In order to measure how much cities' crises have changed, the author reflects on the causes that generated them in the 1960s and on the shape that they then took, taking the US and France as illustrations. He takes public space as a kind of laboratory for current claims, protests and cultural insubordination. Forms of resistance in public space are currently boosted by the use of social media. Yet public space remains determinant in the disorder process; it is a political resource. The author argues that horizontal protest movements are not enough to change the neoliberal system which has met little opposition in the last fifty years. A transformation of institutions is needed as well. Cities offer an alternative path for progressive change to take place.

During August 1940 Winston Churchill's government confirmed its support for Free France. Following an agreement reached with the Prime Minister on August, Charles de Gaulle was officially permitted to recruit armed forces under Free French jurisdiction. By late 1940 the banks of Free French Africa relied upon the assurance of regular sterling transactions within individual colonies to assure their liquidity. Writing in mid-November 1940, the British Colonial Secretary, Lord Lloyd, concluded that the recent spate of Free French successes in Africa was at an end. The British blockade of Vichy Africa did not yield immediate results. With Operation Menace (the codename for the Dakar assault), de Gaulle became openly complicit in British attempts to destroy what remained of Vichy's overseas armed forces. In the event, the British and Free French contacts with Weygand were soon undermined by increased Vichy collaborationism.

This chapter examines the primary and secondary periods in Central Africa, and the ways in which they began to give way to the Hunt. White hunters appeared in Central Africa from the 1850s, and by the 1870s and 1880s they had become very nearly a flood. The exploits of Frederick Lugard illustrate the manner in which hunters, campaigners and administrators fused in the years immediately before and after the establishment of white rule. In 1890, the haphazard intrusions of hunters, prospectors, traders and missionaries had been replaced by the systematic invasion of the British South Africa Company. The Union Castle Line guides to East and southern Africa devoted a great deal of attention to African fauna, hunting and game laws. If game laws did little to hinder the white onslaught they were largely irrelevant to Africans. Africans were denied access to game primarily through the operation of gun laws.

Ginsberg was famous for chronicling every facet of his life, and his last poems in the mid 1990s frequently reflect an intense self-consciousness about his final illnesses. While earlier in his career, the body was an important site for Ginsberg’s poetics of candor, confrontation, and erotic epiphanies, he remained equally adamant as his health faltered in ascertaining his physical deterioration in poems such as “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” and “Sphincter.” Even during his final period, however, Ginsberg’s level of literary fame provided him access to figures in popular music that amplified his cultural prominence and enabled him to retain a sense of artistic relevance. Simultaneously with his meditations on death, Ginsberg’s culminating poems maintained his renowned sly humor about his social status as a writer whose expansive cultural reputation included the continuity of radical political critique. This chapter on his posthumous volume Death and Fame: Last Poems 1993–1997 (1999) explores Ginsberg’s attempts to reconcile the problematic contexts of fame’s durability while struggling to find succor, in both Buddhist and poetic terms, with his accelerating disability and terminal departure.

This chapter is concerned with how art can engage with migration politics related to the categories of forced and irregular migration. These categories include refugees and asylum seekers. The chapter examines how artworks can question the citizenship gap and the social stigmatisation of irregular migrants as 'crimmigrant' bodies. The centrepiece of this discussion is Sahara Chronicle, a video-based work by the Swiss artist Ursula Biemann, which investigates the conditions of migration in the geopolitical space of the Sahara. The chapter focuses on the migrants' perilous journey from the coast of Africa across the Mediterranean Sea to the shores of Europe. That journey has been evoked in the British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien's video installation Western Union: Small Boats. It considers issues of European border politics and securitisation, along with their consequences for forced migrants.