This chapter begins by surveying the linguistic history of Ireland. Although it is situated on the periphery of the British Isles, there is evidence of contact between the island, other regions of Britain and indeed other countries in western Europe for centuries. It explores early and later contacts between the indigenised Celts and more recent colonisers and immigrants, including the Normans, the English, the Scots and twentieth-century settlers from the European Union prior to Brexit. These contacts have created a set of contemporary Irish English varieties that are not only distinctive with respect to other world Englishes but are also differentiated diatopically, ethnically and socially. Two main topics are addressed. The degree to which Irish English from different time frames is structurally similar to other dialects spoken elsewhere is considered alongside evaluating the extent to which contemporary Irish Englishes vary internally and externally with respect to their lexis, phonology, morphosyntax and discourse pragmatics. Some space is also devoted to examining how the study of Irish English has developed and what directions research might take in the twenty-first century in response to new approaches to modelling linguistic contact as well as the availability of larger and more diverse digital datasets.

This chapter introduces a new research program on the politics of religion and secularism. A focus on the politics of religion and secularism offers a productive port of entry into the study of international politics. Following a brief introduction to religion and international relations, it offers a basic introduction to the concept of secularism, explains why the politics of secularism is significant to the study of global politics and concludes with a discussion of the politics of secularism in the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79.

This book is the result of a collective effort by a group of scholars from Latin America, Europe, and the USA, who together wished to write a legal history that would center on the common experiences of Latin American societies over a long period, which began before Europeans invaded the continent and continue to date. The aim was to identify a narrative that would observe common trends, manifest the dramatic shifts that had occurred throughout this period, and insert these findings into a wider perspective. This in turn would reveal that debates taking place in Latin America were often linked to discussions transpiring elsewhere, to which they both contributed and from which they received input and inspiration. Our first aim, therefore, is to craft a pan-Latin American narrative and insert it into a global perspective. Our second aim is to propose a new methodology that places at the center questions rather than answers, processes rather than results, and contexts rather than descriptions of solutions. We also want to demonstrate the multiple levels on which law operates and how deeply it is embedded in social, political, cultural, and economic processes.

After many years during which indigenous laws were mostly absent from narratives of Latin American law, presently, legal historians wish to integrate them. However, to do so requires answering the question of what we know about indigenous laws and how we can approach them. Writing the history of indigenous laws from precolonial times is especially challenging not only because of the diversity of human groups that occupied the continent, but also because of the disparity of available sources, ranging from material vestiges and pictographic documents to texts produced in indigenous writing systems. Furthermore, the colonial period has left us with a wide range of alphabetic texts, diverse in authorship, languages, formats, degree of accuracy, and sources selected, that describe precolonial law. Indigenous peoples, mestizos, and Spaniards also wrote historical narratives and accounts of deeds and services; furthermore, they participated as litigants in lawsuits in which they expressed their vision of law and justice. What does this evidence tell us about precolonial normative orders and the way in which they intersected with colonial law after the Iberian imperial conquests? To answer this question, this chapter proposes an interdisciplinary approach, surveying what has been done, and what could still be done.

The summative discussion opens with the dethronement of major music impresario and last King of Lucknow, Wajid ‘Ali Shah, and the canonical treatises his chief rabab player Basit Khan took with him into exile in 1856. I then synthesise the findings of the previous chapters to explore the reasons why both colonial and Indian/mixed-race figures wrote about music during this transitional period. For the coloniser, I argue, the reasons were a hunger to collect the auditory picturesque and, later, to control musical communities. Mughal writers, in contrast, were grappling with significant change as well as trying to mitigate the loss those changes threatened to their beloved musical culture. I conclude with the aftermath of the devastating 1857 Uprising as the reason we have forgotten these musicians and their writings, and point to the lingering echoes of the late Mughal in the classical music of today.

“Decolonizing the Medieval Literary Curriculum” shows why the critical teaching of the literatures of the deep past – in the form of a critical canon, and a countercanon – is essential today, at a moment when White supremacist and alt-right groups in the West are weaponizing the symbols, cultures, and histories of the European Middle Ages to assemble a spurious, fantasied past of White racial purity and superiority, prelapsarian Christian homogeneity, and religiopolitical supremacy so as to make this fantasied past the basis of authority for transforming today’s world. At the same time, changing population demographics in the West are creating cohorts of students in higher learning who have diversified substantially in terms of their race, class, countries of origin, sexualities, genders, and physical, cultural, and psychosocial composition. Students, even more than faculty, have called for curricular transformations that are responsive to the urgencies of our time. The pedagogical strategies and curricular offerings in this essay are thus an example of the efforts undertaken today by a community of largely premodernists of color who are working to teach a decolonizing curriculum, and who are profoundly engaged in transforming how the deep past is taught and studied in the twenty-first century academy.

Introduces the Volume

This chapter examines the colonial novel of the 1920s–1940s as a form that mediates and distils the imperial logic that connects the nation and the colony. Divided into two sections, the chapter argues that the colonial novel thinks about the difference – even as it brings that difference into being – between that which is the imperial-national and that which constitutes the colonial, and the relationship between the two. The first section focuses on the representations of the colonial club – the center of political, economic, social and affective energy – as the natural site for exploring the emergence and decline of the British colonial sphere and its relationship with the imperial structures of the nation. The second section examines how two late colonial novels depict the impotence, misery and accrued weariness of imperial rule. The novels carefully and deliberately unravel any notion of imperial authority, in institutions or in individuals, and foreground the distance between imperial rhetoric and colonial reality.

This chapter considers how Australian children’s and young adult literature published from the late twentieth century complicates early depictions of Anglo-Australian young people as uniquely connected with rural adventures and larrikinism through the exploration of urban Australian lives and multiculturalism. It pairs six novels as exemplars of three key moments of transition in Australian children’s literature in the past half century. First, it discusses Ivan Southall’s Josh (1971) as indicative of the abandonment of the bush as a central concern in the genre, situating it in relation to John Marsden’s Tomorrow, When the War Began (1993), which depicts rural Australia as under threat, rather than as a threat to children, as was typical in depictions of the bush in colonial children’s literature. Second, it examines the turn towards representations of ethnic diversity in Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi (1992), a narrative of European assimilation, and Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Does My Head Look Big in This? (2005), which responded to post-9/11 anti-Islamic sentiment. Finally, it considers two novels published in 1998 that signal the long road to the depiction of fully realised Indigenous characters: Phillip Gwynne’s Deadly, Unna? (1998) and Melissa Lucashenko’s Killing Darcy (1998).

Until 1988, little was known about the extent of massacres of Aboriginal people and British settlers across the Australian frontier 1788-1928. Since then the question has dominated Australian historiography and raised the critical question: Were the massacres an expression of genocide? This chapter surveys the debate’s origins in the 1970s and the opposing schools of thought that emerged in response: settler genocide versus Aboriginal resistance. In the 1990s the debate focussed on the level of violence on the colonial frontier in Victoria. A decade later the debate shifted to the colonial frontier in Tasmania and changed direction. Historians of Aboriginal resistance were accused of inventing frontier massacres and fabricating footnotes while others claimed there were very few massacres and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were responsible for their own demise. In response new methods emerged to understand the characteristics of frontier massacre and interrogate the disparate sources of evidence. New texts argued that frontier massacres were a critical component of Tasmanian Aboriginal dispossession. Today digital mapping technologies have identified more than 300 sites of frontier massacre across Australia, providing new evidence that they constitute genocide.

Ever since Adam Hochschild wrote in 1998 that the killings and excess deaths in King Leopold II’s Congo Free State (1885-1908), though of genocidal proportions, did not, “strictly speaking,” constitute genocide, the debate his words sparked has not abated. Historians and others have embraced or denounced the proposition that what occurred in the Congo Free State during the 33 years of its legal existence, 1885-1908, was, in fact, genocidal. Officially sanctioned colonial slaughter had many names: military (in the course of war), pacifying, punitive, retaliatory, and even salutary, to teach the colonized a lesson. At times, colonial governments killed subject peoples to eliminate groups that were deemed incorrigible. The question of intent has a strange role in the study of the pace, scale, and nature of the Congo killings, which were simultaneously genocidal, exterminationist, and the unfortunate result of a highly lethal form of economic exploitation. The logic of the system of rule and economic exploitation relentlessly tended toward atrocity and murder. Whether intentional or not, the slaughter did not end until the Congo Free State itself did, and its long-term effects reverberated for many years thereafter.

This chapter provides an integrated history of territorial seizure and annihilative measures across three distinct colonial regions - Queensland, the Northern Territory and the northern reaches of Western Australia. The vast arc of Tropical Australia is examined within a single narrative frame, bound by several consistent, over-arching themes: escalating land theft with all its accompanying violences in the latter nineteenth century, into the twentieth; the enhanced capacity in remote regions to mask multiple colonial atrocities and promote intense cultural denialism; and the dramatic intensity of Western expansion, first throughout the vast territory of Queensland, then pushing westward from that base across the remaining tropical zones. Thus, the seemingly independent colonial stories are conjoined into a singular narrative of advance, dispossession and the brutal destruction of lives, societies and cultures, underscoring the environmental theft and transformation of land and nature. This destructive process is here termed ‘indigenocide’ – the inter-connection of mass homicide, ethnocide and ecocide, simultaneously imposed in one sustained, three-pronged attack. Indigenous military resistance continually contests the invasive thrust, demonstrating how, in situations of asymmetrical struggle, warfare can rapidly morph into relentless massacre; as colonialism, in its fundamental practices, becomes virtually synonymous with all the attributes of racial genocide.

K-pop formations are believed to have drawn inspiration from Seo Taiji and Boys, who arrived in the early 1990s and became a cultural phenomenon before disbanding in 1996. They offered a unique blend of melodic tunes, heavy beats, short raps, and synchronized dance sequences that drew on hip hop, rock, and disco. They transformed Korean music and fashion and had a profound effect on young Koreans’ sense of identity and national pride. However, despite the band’s pioneering role, it did not provide a blueprint for the business model of K-pop today. Partly in response to the decline in record sales, today’s reliance on concert tours, marketing media, and talent shows developed later. But the formulas themselves are not entirely new to Korean pop music. This chapter explores talent shows organized in the 1930s and 1940s. Although the conditions of pop music were different then, the early prevalence of the shows demonstrates that public auditions, competition, and audience participation took root early on. Focusing on the symptomatic ethos, signs, and practices of neoliberalism, rather than retrofitting the neoliberal era to the 1930s, the author contends that the music industry recognized by then that neoliberal attributes can be a powerful marketing ploy.

The anti-colonial struggle staged in Zimbabwe against repressive British colonial rule depicted a liberation for equality, freedom and democracy. If Zimbabwe regularly held elections to choose alternative leaders from different political parties in different elections, allowing winners of a free and fair election to assume office; and in turn the winners of one election did not prevent the same competitive uncertainty from prevailing in the next election, the country would be democratic. However, there is no equivalence between elections and democracy. The minimalist conception of democracy is the indispensable institutional characteristic of electoral competition and its uncertainty. The maximalist notion requires extra-electoral imperatives for democracy to fully flourish, incorporating a wide range of types of institutions, processes and conditions to be present for a nation to be called a full democracy. Widespread election violence in 1980 dented Zimbabwe’s opportunity to develop ideal democratic cultures that embrace electoral democracy, government accountability and the rule of law. Post-war political, dissident and election violence proved to be Zimbabwe’s greatest political problem early on. Election and political violence, mhirizhonga or udlakela, largely amongst the Ndebele and Shona was a major concern characterised by intimidation, harassment, vandalism and murders.

The chapter recovers and investigates a substantial body of poems from undivided India composed during 1914–1918 and how such a corpus challenges conventional Anglo-centric understandings of the term 'First World War poetry'. Showcasing the remarkable range and richness of war poetry written in Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, and English, the chapter examines some of their historical and formal complexities, including their oral and aural dimensions; in the absence of testimonies, such poetry fills in the gaps left by history. Starting with civilian verse and songs – elite and subaltern, written and spoken, pro-war and anti-war, direct, oblique or diffuse - I propose the idea of a war 'poetics' rather than ‘poetry’ from combatant men and village women who were often non-literate but highly literary. I conclude with readings of the 'war poems' of Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammed Iqbal and Kazi Nazrul Islam, the national poets of the future India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh respectively.

This chapter recovers the performances of Saint Domingue’s refugees who fled the slave uprisings and acted out their relationship to Haiti on professional American stages. The Haitian Revolution’s refugees also appeared as stage characters in original plays such as John Murdock’s 1795 The Triumphs of Love, which reimagined refugees as refined but unfortunate figures, integrating them into American culture by differentiating them from comic but rebellious slaves.