For over fifty years, Canada’s language regime has centered - in theory, policy, and practice - on a binary: linguistic duality and authority of the two settler colonial powers, English and French. The legislative enshrinement of status for these colonial languages, by way of the 1969 Official Languages Act, has on most accounts failed in multiple ways. As is well documented, legislated equality between French and English has rarely manifested itself in practice. Less attention - scholarly or political - has been paid to the Indigenous languages erased by both political discourse and public policy in Canada. What limited policy attention there has been has focused on Indigenous languages as second languages. The development of the Canadian Parliament’s Indigenous Languages Act, launched by the Government of Canada on December 5, 2016, attempted to fill this gap. Analysis of this process reveals the tensions within Canada’s established language regime, while putting into sharp relief the difficulties of policy and policymakers to attend to - and move beyond - Canada’s colonial past and framework.

India’s language policy choices soon after independence established a complex and multifaceted language regime that is often deemed a success for an immensely diverse postcolonial state. It is argued that its choices were informed by a demotic tradition that emerged in various regions of the subcontinent in the precolonial period and that was reconfigured under colonialism. First, what is called “demotic regionalism” is traced back to vernacularization in precolonial India, when local languages began being used in regional political-sociocultural realms in lieu of Sanskrit. Regional variations in whether vernacularization was state driven or demos driven often reflected the strength of the demotic norm in constituting demotic regionalism, informing language regimes that were fluid, multilingual, and increasingly inclusive. The chapter then discusses how colonialism reconfigured the demotic regionalism tradition, muting the demotic norm and replacing it with ethnicity, creating a colonial language regime that was still multilingual but rigid and hierarchical, and that compromised diversity. It then details India’s postindependence language regime, demonstrating how demotic regionalism informed specific policy choices while being mediated by colonial legacies and imperatives of the modern state. The final section shows how this language regime has remained multilingual and hierarchical, albeit by way of democratic politics rather than colonial fiat.

How does one speak of “African” state traditions, when they have been so deeply marked by outside intervention? Colonial traditions informed virtually all independent African states’ language policies. This chapter expands the STLR framework to postcolonial Africa, suggesting that continent-wide traditions include states oriented outwardly, with minimal accountability to citizens, whose populations are treated as possessing fixed linguistic identities. Beneath these macro traditions are more divergent paths deriving from historical and institutional differences, namely experiences with varying types of colonial rule and construction as either federal or unitary states. This chapter explores the case of Burkina Faso, which displays both the continent-wide traditions as well as a francophone, unitary path, situating it within an analysis of language regimes across Africa. It juxtaposes the constraints of tradition with the critical juncture and policy feedback that produced change across Africa in the last few decades. Finally, it argues that Africa’s language regimes will likely not fit comfortably into existing monolingual or fixed multilingual templates, since they are interacting with precolonial traditions. Rather, the policies that emerge will reflect people’s evolving language use, particularly relating to African lingua francas.

As Stephen Dedalus walks upon Sandymount Strand in Ulysses, he thinks, “the land a maze of dark cunning nets … Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersman and master mariners. Human shells” (3.154–57). This thought evokes Ireland’s complicated position as an island nation and its entanglements with fellow colonized peoples. For Ireland’s cultural mariners of the twentieth century, navigating such currents requires a knowledge not only of sea but also of sky. In the “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses, a chapter where the city of Dublin is the prominent star, the sections are separated by a series of three asterisks also known as a dinkus. As a writer for the Paris Review explains, a dinkus is “used as a section break in a text. It’s the flatlining of an asterism (⁂), which in literature is a pyramid of three asterisks and in astronomy is a cluster of stars.” Asterisms serve as a striking intervention into the textual groundswells of Joyce’s Ulysses that ultimately connect to Derek Walcott’s own navigations in Omeros as a means of paternal inheritance and transatlantic affiliation.

There is a tendency to treat African journalism fields as insignificant to scholarship unless the scholarly focus is on “improving” or “modernizing” them. This chapter argues against this tendency by arguing that African journalism is engaged in knowledge production and all its attendant politics. It argues that by taking a conflict such as Darfur as a locus, scholars can excavate the multiple discursive struggles over questions such as the role of African journalism, the place of African news organizations in global narrative construction about Africa, and the politics of belonging in which African journalists debate what it means to be African. Relying on field theory, postcolonial theory, and the sociology of knowledge, this chapter argues for a de-Westernization of journalism studies while cogently locating the origins of field theory in Algeria; thus connecting it not just to the colonial project but specifically locating field theory with a larger discourse of postcoloniality.

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.