This chapter proposes a queer-crip genealogy in American poetry stretching from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century to the present day. Through close readings of poems by twentieth-century poets Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde and twenty-first century poets Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Kay Ulanday Barrett, a queer disability poetics can be discerned and analyzed. This poetics is deeply concerned with identity, community, intersectionality, and resistance, and is characterized by themes of sexuality, witness, survival, and joy. Throughout this chapter, “crip poetics” is deployed not merely as a descriptor but as an analytic lens applied to poems that have been previously read primarily through understandings of disability as metaphor, alienation, or lack. Crip poetics instead reveals how disability can function as a source of connection, sustenance, and transformation in these poets’ work and in their worlds.

New Spain’s integration into the Pacific Basin played an important role in the viceroyalty’s political and social history. Interactions between the two become visible in descriptions of Spain’s distributive struggles. The conclusion argues that diverging notions of a deserving self and undeserving other produced by such disputes were strategic responses to a changing world in which the increasing mobility of people and goods created both opportunities and fierce competition over limited benefits and resources. Consideration of the ways in which these men and women engaged with the logic of assessment has resulted in a more variegated understanding of their views of the world, as well as their places within it, that acknowledges not only individual agendas but their divergent relationships to collectives as well. While Pacific and transpacific exchanges continued to have an impact on distributive struggles after 1640, the importance of the hierarchy of beneméritos, as it developed in the wake of the diminished conquest, once again altered discussions about worthiness and unworthiness and the ways in which people identified themselves and others.

With the expansion of Spanish activities into the Pacific Basin, New Spain increasingly became a global point of intersection for imperial, commercial, and religious networks. The mobility of persons and goods affected external perceptions of New Spain’s place in a globalizing world, as well as its residents’ self-perception. The Introduction observes that these transformations have typically been studied through the lens of a historiographic narrative about creolization. After reviewing debates about the use of the creole paradigm for the study of Spanish identities in the Indies, the chapter introduces the notion of the deserving self, which had emerged in the context of late medieval struggles over the distribution of royal favor, as an alternative framework for studying the interrelationship between movement and processes of identity-making and identification at this crossroad of transoceanic networks. Finally, it explains the link between various conceptualizations of a deserving self and the stories people recounted about the world and the desirability of global integration.

This chapter introduces the critical issues that permeate the discussion of the location and horizon of Coetzee’s literary practice. It starts by noting a polarization among critics between those who characterize his literary project as being a highly localized one that speaks to the condition of South Africa and those who regard his work as being concerned with universal problems and as belonging to ‘world literature’. It delves into this problem by considering the way Coetzee himself narrates the vicissitudes of a writer navigating national and global literary fields in Elizabeth Costello. Looking next at his corpus as a whole, the chapter argues that an appreciation of Coetzee’s peculiar world-making fictional strategies helps us to discern that world (or worlds) to which his fictions seek to orient us. It concludes by considering Coetzee’s recent interest in the ‘literatures of the south’, speculating that his corpus has been concerned to explore through its world-making what it means to live beneath southern horizons.

This chapter undertakes to explore a particular seismic shift in the fields of both thought and perception unfolding during the early part of the Cold War, as governments and publics grappled uneasily with the threat of nuclear war. I focus on the exploration of a particular cinematic event: the global release in late 1959 of the anti-nuclear war dystopian film On the Beach. Directed by the American Stanley Kramer and based on a 1957 novel by the British-Australian Nevil Shute, the film offers an opportunity to revisit and reflect on the tangled intersections between the cultural, legal and geopolitical orientations of this ‘hot’ Cold War moment from a new angle. While in 1959 an international legal architecture governing nuclear testing and nuclear non-proliferation had yet to emerge, the approach taken in this chapter suggests that a re-examination of this kind – that is attentive to the modes of perception (as well as discourse) that are emergent in this moment may be of interest to contemporary legal scholars seeking to make sense of a world in which nuclear threats have not abated, and international law’s role in managing that threat remains in question.