Within the last two decades, the specialized term “chara” has gained recognition for denoting fictional beings that seem typical for Japanese popular media. Usually, a distinction is made that charas – distinguished from “characters” – are somehow independent of the narrative. Since the term emerged in a variety of different discourses, however, it serves many contradictory functions. This chapter maps different ways to conceptualize the protagonists of Japanese popular culture as charas with regard to the popular franchise Demon Slayer (Kimetsu no Yaiba). It introduces four relevant oppositions: “consequentiality versus cartoonishness,” “representational realism versus ludic realism,” “narrative consumption versus database consumption,” and “authorized works versus secondary productions.” What connects all these vastly different meanings of charas and the respective “other sides of narrative” is a shared interest in characters not as parts of closed, fictional stories or worlds but as nodal points of historically changing media practices and conventionalized modes of imagination and participation.

This chapter explores how the culturally and medically prized concept of narrative influences pessimism about ageing. Taking dementia as a situation where anxieties about ageing and continuity of self are particularly acute, it illustrates the pressure emanating from narrativity for life as lived and life as narrated, revealing episodicity as a viable response to this two-fold pressure. Reading life histories of older people, it additionally shows that episodicity is hugely relevant also for how life is pitched retrospectively. Overall, this chapter argues that a stronger focus on episodic self-experience throughout life has the potential to challenge aspects of the decline narrative that nourishes pessimism about ageing.

Where some chapters in this volume find narrative in the phenomena addressed by scientists, or in their reporting and representational practices, or in their argumentation and reasoning, this chapter finds narrative at the level of field and subfield formation. It does so through the history of historiography and philosophy of history, particularly the work of scholars who have differentiated the many forms of historical knowledge. Focusing on just three – the chronicle, the genealogy and the narrative – the chapter explains how these means for making historical knowledge might be made to cover knowledge-making in the sciences. The first half of the chapter develops this analytical approach, while the second applies it to the case of synthetic biology. By taking narrative’s epistemic significances more seriously we arrive at a new way to explain scientific change over time.

Ukraine is the largest country by territory within the European continent and a global geopolitical flashpoint. At a time of trauma and transition, Ukrainian cultural producers have begun to confront questions of Ukraine’s national identity and linguistic diversity with new urgency and fresh perspective. This chapter sheds light on the evolving dynamic between multilingualism and identity in contemporary Ukrainian culture by employing the practices of both sociological and literary analysis. Through semi-structured interviews and close readings of prominent artistic texts, we focus on the ways in which Ukrainian cultural producers embrace linguistic diversity while simultaneously privileging the Ukrainian language and promoting national consolidation in wartime. This ‘practical multilingualism’ is particularly evident in literary and cinematic dialogues that feature characters discussing their belonging to Ukraine across languages. In the field of nationalism studies, such ‘scenes of talk’ (Herman 2006) invite a reassessment of the almost exclusive emphasis on narrative in analyses of the role of culture in the life of the nation.

“Narrating Postcolonial Nigeria” sets the pace for Understanding Modern Nigeria by providing backgrounds to the both the existing and emerging narratives of Nigeria as a state, especially as it navigates its post/modern manifestation. This discourse takes on the various explications of postcolonialism to contextualize the narrativity broadly and adequately, and provide an understanding of Nigeria through a diachronic examination of its conception and projections. From literature and history in the humanities to economics and politics in the social sciences, this chapter focuses on how postcolonial temperaments differ (and align) across fields, regions, and histories of Nigeria, and, of course, how they contribute to the overarching narratives of how Nigeria is grappling with its postcolonial and post/modern transitions. Providing a summation to the issues, challenges, and solutions engaged in Understanding Modern Nigeria, this chapter provides insight into the most dominant narrative preoccupations of postcolonial Nigeria, among which are ethnicity, governance, democracy, and development. These interconnected frames explain the complications that shape the daily lives of Nigerians, but most importantly, create spaces for purposive reframing which help to channel an enabling path toward an enhanced development of Nigeria within the order of globality, especially as Nigeria plays a major role within the broader frame of Africa.

The book begins with a broad introduction situating the development of colonial law alongside the rise of the novel. The introduction offers an overview of the architecture of colonial sovereignty while also delving into its specifically legal context. From the move toward the codification of laws to the adjudication of cases in the Privy Council, the introduction reveals the ways in which the law provided a narrative for colonial lives. At the same time, the introduction shows how broader cultural narratives as represented in the era’s literature influenced the law. Even if, as is customarily claimed, the substance of law in the colonies was haphazard and drawn from multiple legal traditions, its authority was largely founded in claims to absolute sovereignty. The introduction frames the ways in which bloodline claims to the sovereignty of kingship were reconfigured in the colonies to enact a biopolitical sovereignty of race.