This epilogue concludes the book by reflecting on emerging opportunities and challenges in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights six unfolding revolutions: life sciences, information and communications, complexity theory, data science, education and rights-based activism. The latter is particularly important, as the potential of all the other revolutions to improve the health of all depends on it. Finally, we reaffirm our commitment to clear thinking for effective action: In our turbulent world, knowledge remains the most powerful force for enlightened social transformation.

During the first half of 1978, mourning processions were held in Iran for activists felled in prior demonstrations. The device occasioned subsequent political protests, fostering a series of horizontally organized demonstrations that lasted six months. Accounts of what transpired, published in pamphlets at the time, are replete with exhortations for others to join. The documents extend discursive patterns found in courtroom appeals and defenses made by leftist activists over the course of the twentieth century. In this language, we find visions of a collective revolutionary subject configured as an individual worthy of empathy and observation, recalling overlaps between human rights advocacy and guerrilla warfare. The discursive pattern challenges divides between materialism and culture in the study of modern Iran. Analyses of the revolutionary process in Iran make recourse to pragmatism, and yet they elide the importance of language and culture displayed here. This chapter argues that a pragmatic sensibility corresponds with adaptations of the Karbala paradigm in Taziyeh processions. To the extent that the former reflects individual investments in self-preservation, the latter cultivates investment in communal self-preservation through memorialization.

Japanese society is subject to centrifugal forces that tend to promote diversification in structural arrangements, lifestyles, and value orientations, while a range of centripetal forces drives it towards homogeneity and uniformity. This chapter endeavors to recapitulate these two forces in the context of Japan’s civil society, focusing on five key areas.

The first four investigate various aspects of centrifugal forces: the fragmentation of social relations, a significant development affecting the foundations of Japanese society over the past few decades; the rise of social movements in the 2010s despite this trend; the quiet growth of volunteer activities and the role of NPOs and NGOs as a backdrop for dissenting protests, and the shifting landscape of interest groups overall; and the viability of an emic notion similar to citizenship in analyzing the Japanese context.

The final section aims to establish an analytical framework for various forms of centripetal control and to synthesize their diverse characteristics as ‘friendly authoritarianism’ permeating Japanese society.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, assertions of Indigenous sovereignty in the late twentieth century propelled a nation-wide reform known as ‘biculturalism’. This chapter contributes to the task of historicizing ‘biculturalism’ by examining its emergence in anticolonial and anti-racist activism of the 1970s and 1980s. It focuses on the interplay between ideas of ‘race’ and ‘culture’ in activist discourse and theories of settler colonialism. Opposing statist assimilation, a radicalised, younger generation of activists found common cause in political Blackness. Yet, without the means to implement anti-colonial revolution, Māori activist intellectuals pursued another idea: that Pākehā (white settlers) who could not be forced out, might instead become ‘bicultural’ in the way that Māori already had to be in a white majority country. However, this activist biculturalism was predicated in the recognition of Māori, not settler, sovereignty as the basis for authority. The chapter highlights the contradictions and equivocations in emergent threads of a discourse of biculturalism, staying close to the distinctive dilemmas of anticolonial Indigenous politics in majority settler states.

Chapter 16 explores the theme of modern Indigenous peoples through five novels: Quarup (1967) by Antônio Calado, Maíra (1976) by Darcy Ribeiro, Nove noites (2002) by Bernardo de Carvalho, O som do rugido da onça (2020) by Micheliny Verunschk, and O que falam as águas (2022) by Ezequiel Vitor Tuxá. It opens by placing nineteenth-century Romantic indianismo alongside its early twentieth-century modernista counterpart, setting the stage for an analysis of Indigenous-themed novels published after the 1960s. While these works share certain themes, they do not form a unified group, as they vary widely in how they approach Indigenous issues. For example, themes of resistance and activism appear only in novels written after the 1988 Brazilian constitution, particularly in those by Verunschk and Tuxá. These two writers, however, offer notably different viewpoints, with Tuxá standing out as the only Indigenous author featured in this chapter.

Peter Ronaldson was an inmate of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum in the 1840s and contributed to the first issue of its Morningside Mirror. Soon after the publication of the periodical, Ronaldson escaped. Tracing Ronaldson’s story in the available records, the conclusion reflects on the difficulty of constructing coherent narratives out of partially preserved complex and fluid institutional experiences. It nevertheless argues that asylum periodicals are invaluable resources for understanding life in nineteenth-century institutions, suggests directions for further research using the publications, and highlights their relevance to mental health and Mad activism.

This introductory chapter provides a rationale for the study of Allen Ginsberg and his poetry while outlining the major themes, issues, and motivations of the volume. Ginsberg is an essential figure in twentieth-century US poetics. His work is an important part of the larger turn from “closed” to “open” verse forms in the postwar period, and his role as perhaps the major countercultural figure in the 1960s and 1970s meant that his work garnered an international audience. The goal of this volume is to provide readers with the context necessary to understand how Ginsberg’s life and interests shaped his work; how his work, in its turn, entered the greater poetic discourse of the time; and finally, how Ginsberg sought to influence not just American but indeed global political and cultural realities of the postwar period. Taking a broadly chronological approach, this volume charts the wide variety of contexts crucial to understanding not just Ginsberg, his writing, and his career, but many of the larger trends of the long twentieth century as well.

Chapter 6 concludes the book by turning the lens to exiled dissidents to contextualize the impact of emigrants’ departures. Unlike emigrants, who may hold opposing views but depart voluntarily without government involvement, dissidents are often pressured or coerced to leave their countries of origin because of their opposition to the government and its policies. As organizers of democratic movements, they offer a unique perspective about the cumulative effect of people’s emigration over time. Based on two dozen interviews with activists from across the Middle East several years after the Arab uprisings, the chapter tells their stories and demonstrates what their loss has meant to the pro-democratic movements they left behind. Through their narratives, the extent to which their political agendas rely on rank-and-file supporters who are also positioned to emigrate can be discerned. The chapter concludes by considering the political and policy implications of Democratic Drain.

This chapter focuses on blackface in Argentina, and on the larger implications embedded within the practice in that specific nation. The particularities of its use in the Argentine context are significant because of the country’s powerful nation-building mythology, which holds there are no Black people in the nation. Numerous scholarly investigations have demonstrated the consistent and sustained presence of Africans and Afrodescendants throughout the country’s history.

Did Victorian literature prompt political change? This chapter examines Thomas Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Cry of the Children,” both credited with bringing mass awareness to exploitative labor. But what part did they play in actually changing Victorian society? Levine argues that a single work of art, then as now, does not accomplish change unless it takes part in campaigns that are organized around three social forms: large shows of public support, sustained pressure over time, and specific, well-articulated goals. Analyzing the relations between literary and activist forms not only throws light on Victorian culture but can also help literary scholars now to engage in effective political and social struggle.

Francisco Bilbao (1823–1865) was a Chilean writer and political activist educated at the Instituto Nacional. He rose to notoriety when he published an essay, the “Sociabilidad chilena” (1844), condemning the role of both the Catholic Church and the legacies of colonialism in Chile. He was brought to trial for violating the laws regulating press freedoms. As a result, he left Chile for Europe, where he established contact with Edgar Quinet and Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais and witnessed the European revolutions of 1848. Returning to Chile, he founded the Society of Equality in 1850 and participated in the uprising of April 1851, which led to his exile in Peru, Europe, and Argentina, where he died. His principal works, in addition to “Sociabilidad,” are La América en peligro (1862), and El evangelio americano (1864). The essay included here is representative of his views regarding the radical contradiction between Catholicism and republicanism, which was in turn an expression of his views on the struggle between despotism and freedom.

This chapter reflects on the book’s exploration of drama and performance that reveal the entanglements of natural phenomena and human behaviours in society, each shaping one another in dynamic interplay. The book concludes by considering how artists continue to want to make work about anthropogenic ecological change. We suggest here that performative actions of dissent can offer shared optimistic moments. This chapter looks at the tactics of tactics of artists and activists who perform actions to physically resist, slow or block ecological damage, attempting to hold big corporations and politicians to account and keep urgent ecological issues under public scrutiny.