The Preface introduces some of the key questions and analytical points of the book, its sources, and some of its contributions. It details how the book was inspired by an art exhibition that the authors co-organized with art historian Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz and the process through which some of the questions posed by the exhibition became a book project. It discusses how it was frequently difficult to assess whether an artist was racialized, at least in some social contexts, as a person of African descent, and the author’s strategies to handle this question.

Three types of experiments were carried out in colonial India that made a long-term impact on the future of agrarian modernization in sovereign India. One was the colonial state’s investment in irrigation canals that spurred the rise of three distinct agrarian regions. The agriculture in these regions was supported by a new wave of scientism in colonial policy in the early twentieth century as the colonial state utilized Mendelian science to develop and propagate better varieties of wheat in north India. Towards the end of colonial rule, the colonialists also experimented with a project of intensification wherein select districts were provided concentrated inputs to raise yield. On the margins of colonial patterns, the American missionaries set up an agricultural institute in the United Provinces that experimented with rural uplift through a program of teaching, research, and low-cost innovations. This program did not just showcase an alternate program in rural modernization in the colony, but also served as a precursor to the import of Americanist agrarian ideals into India after independence.

Starting with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), the first major Anglophone text reacting to Euro-American colonialism, this chapter traces how Early American texts – such as Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596), John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity” (1630), and William Byrd II’s History of the Dividing Line (post-1728) – reflect the dizzying complexity of economic exchange in the Atlantic colonies before US independence. As European encounters with Indigenous cultures unsettled long-held assumptions about economic value and English colonies adopted multiple systems of exchange to survive, these texts show their colonial actors improvising to navigate ever-shifting conditions. In doing so, I argue, these actors engage in the kind of intersubjective thought experiments that Adam Smith describes in his social and political theories. While contemporary US culture often imagines Smith ushering America into economic modernity, then, these texts show the vector of influence moving in the opposite direction, with Anglophone New World literature showing, very early, the possibilities and problems of the commercial imagination.

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.