This chapter turns to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Swahili coast narratives, focusing on his novel Desertion (2005), which tells stories about interracial intimacies between Indian, Swahili, and European characters across multiple generations in colonial and postcolonial periods. In the nineteenth century, colonial debates on Indian emigration to Africa insisted on a clear racial separation between “native” Africans and Indian “settlers.” Late twentieth-century East African nationalist discourses reproduced this racialized indigeneity as national identity. Gurnah’s critique of this racial nationalism lies in the novel’s experimental aesthetics, which involve perspectival storytelling, nested stories, and inclusion of multiple genres. The novel’s layered narration gives expression to abject, repressed Indian Ocean intimacies, reconfiguring colonial models of racial encounter as part of the longer history of migration and exchange in Indian Ocean. The melancholic return of Indian Ocean affiliations troubles both the racial-dystopic conception of nationhood in postcolonial East Africa and the utopic imagining of a multiracial community of the past or future.

Several contemporary works of Afro-Asian fiction turn simultaneously to the past and the ocean to challenge ethnically exclusive, territorial models of national belonging in the present, generating alternative cartographies interlinking the Indian Ocean world. This means the past is not simply a background against which their narratives unfold—that is, their historical setting—but the past itself functions as an intertext through which an Indian Ocean world gets reimagined. The Introduction examines the rhetoric of loss and recovery in Indian Ocean discourses as a way to theorize the Indian Ocean as a spatio-temporal scale for analyzing literature’s relationship to the past. It explicates the term “anarchival drift” as a self-reflexive mode of addressing the past in Afro-Asian fiction. This historical orientation in literature is not driven by a nostalgic desire to recover the past but rather it serves to excavate the historicity of the present. The chapter illustrates this through a reading of romance and history in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992).

The Coda foregrounds the literary implications of the book’s argument by reflecting on the idea of the Indian Ocean as a comparative literary space. Through an example from Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019), it illustrates a comparative practice wherein the historical, the geopolitical, and the literary come together. The mutual imbrication of the geopolitical and the literary in contemporary Afro-Asian fiction generates the Indian Ocean as a space of comparison where historical relationalities become legible within the exigencies of the present.

This chapter considers the ambiguous utopian impulses of literary, filmic, and television works published and produced in the 1970s. Drawing on the concept of post-imperial melancholy, the chapter traces the utopian contours of these texts’ forceful, often shocking, critique of British imperial nostalgia. It focuses on sub-genres that emerged during this significant decade, including the British alternate history, the dystopia, and reworkings of the classical literary utopia, with reference to writers such as Daphne Du Maurier, Len Deighton, Anthony Burgess, Emma Tennant, Angela Carter, and J. G. Ballard. These three genres, the chapter argues, critically interrogate the utopian impulse in the 1970s and its possible instantiations in national and transnational imagined communities, as well as the built environment in which the modernity of these communities is expressed. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, identifying how this iconic 1970s punk film reframes the classical narrative structure of literary utopias.

This conclusion explores whether nostalgia can exist in postcolonial literatures, burdened as they are by traumatic histories of imperial oppression, by examining the St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott’s variation on Homeric epic, Omeros. Is nostalgia no longer relevant when a culture’s past is cut off by violence and the lost homeland cannot be restored? Or can longing for the irrecoverable past be part of a creative response to problematic histories? This inquiry crystalizes a central aim of the project: to show how nostalgia can be a means of reimagining the national past, an inclusive way of expressing commitment to a particular culture.

This chapter examines the “verse politics” of eighteenth-century Asia. It explores how Anglophone authors used epics and ruin poetry to advance imperialism, assess governmental policy, and reimagine the role of India in the British Empire. To demonstrate poetry’s role in politics and imperial policymaking, this chapter focuses on the career of Eyles Irwin, a colonial administrator stationed in Madras during the 1770s and 1780s and one of the earliest authors to publish English poetry while in India. The chapter analyzes his collection of travel poems, the Occasional Epistles (1783), and his lengthy poetic epistle, “The Ruins of Madura, or, the Hindoo Garden” (c. 1785–92), which versifies the holy sites and gardens of an ancient southern Indian city, Madura (Madurai), and the decayed palace of one of its Hindu rulers, Tirumala Nayaka. From these details, and Madura’s ruins, Irwin reanimates a South Indian culture and polity. Epics and ruin poetry reimagined writing about empire not as an attempt at personal fame but as an extension of imperial policy, and in ruin poetry Anglophone authors sought to reconcile the obvious oppression of India with the supposed liberty of Britain’s empire.

This shorter chapter focuses on one groundbreaking bio-psycho-social network meta-study related to historical trauma in the virtual absence of social science studies. It centers on studies on health and associated health disparities in diaspora populations with migrants from India and Pakistan of the second and third generations. Topics are suicide rates of South Asian women, somatoform symptoms and disorders, and physical health conditions like cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. In addition, an anthology is included on psychiatric, historical, and literary science case studies in which one chapter analyzes the metaphorical use of ‘madness’ as a description of the historical events. It presents small-scale studies from microeconomics on the impact of education, the autoethnography of cultural mourning, and a psychological experiment that examines social identity theory in relation to mutual rejection between Hindus and Muslims. As potential remedies, various forms of commemoration are examined, as they have evolved in India and in the diaspora over the last decade.

Justin Reynolds narrates how Christians argued for religious freedom in rights terms at a moment of transatlantic hegemony in the 1940s, divorcing protection for religious practice from that for religious belief. That required abandonment of older models of Christian politics, but the results have been fateful for the regulation since of non-Christians around the world.

The concept of a right, and the idea of human rights, were familiar abstractions on the brink of the twentieth century. But the history of political mobilization since shows that human rights had a transformative capacity in that century that no prior age had demonstrated. Through the twentieth century, human rights became institutionalized internationally in laws, movements, and organizations that transcended state-based citizenship and governance – which irrevocably changed the politics around them. Rights continued to evolve as the imperial world order transitioned to a postcolonial world of sovereign states as a primary form of political organization. Through twenty-six essays from experts around the world demonstrating how this period is historically distinctive, the fifth volume of The Cambridge History of Rights is a comprehensive and authoritative reference for the history of rights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

For Alden Young and Tinashe Nyamunda, development as a right did no more to further decolonization processes. Rather, development served as a “common language through which both the former colonizers and the ascendant nationalist elites could speak to one another,” setting the stage for “an imperialism of free trade” rather than promoting the rights of the poor and disenfranchised. If decolonization processes remain incomplete as many contributors to this section suggest, so too do aspirational processes of political and economic freedom expressed in the language of rights as racial equality, self-determination, and economic sovereignty.

The epilogue returns to the major themes discussed throughout the book. In addition, it examines the contemporaneous nature of Ghana–Russian relations, particularly through the lens of anti-Black violence and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2021. It also looks at the continued contestation between Ghanaians abroad and the embassy in Russia and Ghanaians’ use of protest domestically to seek better rights and economic benefits. The epilogue demonstrates that while Nkrumah and the explicit debates and discourses on socialism that consumed Ghana in the 1960s have almost vanished, that their ghosts continue to shape Ghanaian society.

This Epilogue documents the colonial coal regime’s struggle for survival during the twilight of French colonialism in Indochina. It also examines the closure and decolonization of large-scale coal mining enterprises and discusses the legacy of coal mining in postcolonial Vietnam.

This chapter considers how colonialism (and its legacy in the postcolonial period) has influenced the articulation of the geographical space of Algiers as a lieu de mémoire in works of fiction written by contemporary Algerian authors of French expression. “Under what historical conditions is a city, and a postcolonial city at that, transformed into a ‘site of memory’?” asks scholar Réda Bensmaïa referring to Algiers. Is Pierre Nora’s les lieux de mémoire framework valid for the colonized as well as the colonizer? From 1962 forward, Algerian authors of French expression have sought to identify spaces that they thought necessary for the progress of the postcolonial nation. For authors such as Kateb Yacine, Rachid Boudjedra, and Assia Djebar, remembering and memory are essential to building national postcolonial identity. These authors were born post-1962 and reside for the most part in Algeria. The chapter studies Samir Toumi’s Alger, le cri (2013) and Kaouther Adimi’s Nos richesses (2017) for what they say about the legacies of colonialism, the Revolution, and the more recent civil war of the 1990s to early 2000s.

In “Realism and the South Asian Novel,” Pranav Jani examines three Anglophone South Asian novels from the turn of the twenty-first century to reveal the complicated relationship between realism and postcoloniality. Often, Anglophone novels after Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children are read as if their postcoloniality implies a postmodernist distancing from realism. But Jani finds that despite their metafictional playfulness and disruption of linear narration, Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography, Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things offer realist practices that illuminate historical truths about postcolonial South Asia. Rather than being anti-realist, Jani contends, these novels expand the real to include epistemological and self-reflexive processes while they criticize social oppression, elite complicity, sectarian and ethnic violence, caste apartheid, and patriarchy. Like the classic social realist novels of the past, recent Anglophone novels are attentive to questions of power and inequality – even as they experiment with form.