Chapter 9 examines how the Odyssey has been continuously reimagined across nearly three millennia, from Dante to contemporary film and literature. It explores how each generation has found in Odysseus’ journey a framework for understanding war trauma, exile, diaspora, and displacement, demonstrating that the epic endures not as a fixed text but as a living narrative that speaks to experiences of loss, return, and the ongoing struggle to rebuild meaning after catastrophe.

Somewhere outside the laws and statutes regulating immigration to the United States, lies practice. While there was nothing on the books during the early 1900s that should have prevented Roma from entering the US at immigration ports, many faced draconian scrutiny upon arrival, whether they claimed to be “Gypsy” or not. These immigration challenges were fueled by a concerted behind-the-scenes effort to constrain their entry. Archival case files that shadow attempts Roma made while trying to enter North America unmask tactics deployed by US and Canadian authorities to exclude Roma, as a people or type, from entry. Decidedly unhidden, however, was press coverage of Romani immigration and settlement. This chapter analyzes the attempts made by several Romani groups to enter the United States during the early 1900s through transatlantic and transcontinental crossings, and which foreshadowed an increase in Romani exclusion, surveillance and public harassment.

Four narratives by Black women – Phyllis Montana-Leblanc’s Not Just the Levees Broke, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s A Kind of Freedom, and Kionna Walker LeMalle’s Behind the Waterline – each offer counterstories and counterhistories against singular, fixed ways of articulating what the cataclysm of Hurricane Katrina meant and means. To contextualize these narratives in intersecting theories of trauma, displacement, home, violence, and Southern Black Womanhood is to see the high stakes often hidden by facile, dominant representations of this territory in shopworn tropes of “resilience” and “soulfulness” and “entertainment.”

Empirical Animal Law examines the animal protection movement through the lens of social science, testing the assumptions that have guided legal reform, criminal enforcement, litigation strategy, protest, and public messaging. Rather than prescribing a single agenda, the book asks a foundational question: Which animal law strategies measurably reduce suffering, and which rest on untested intuition? Across original empirical studies and interdisciplinary review, the authors investigate whether incremental welfare reforms pave the way for structural change; how cognitive biases shape moral concerns for animals used for food; whether the movement’s punitive turn reproduces the inequities of the broader criminal legal system; and whether litigation losses, protest tactics, and moral framing advance or undermine public support. The findings complicate conventional wisdom. Incremental reforms may catalyze further change; carceral strategies carry social costs without clear evidence of animal benefit; and persuasive success depends less on legal outcomes than on how facts are framed and moralized for diverse audiences. The book argues that animal law’s credibility and effectiveness depend on becoming empirically self-correcting – routinely measuring impact, revising strategies, and integrating insights from psychology, criminology, and social movement theory. It offers a framework for evidence-based advocacy aimed at durable, system-level change for animals.

This chapter considers the assumption that carceral animal law alleviates animal suffering, both at the federal and state level. It demonstrates how exclusions from what counts as cruelty in federal law (as in state law) legitimize systematic suffering of animals, Through two state-level case studies, it also shows how carceral animal law may be cruel or excessive itself while distracting attention from greater harms to animals.

In this chapter, we outline how foreign aid and migration management practices impact governance. To do so, we set out to define a new category of aid – migration management aid – and estimate its size, distribution, and impact. We begin by taking a global picture – examining the trends, challenges, and opportunities that migration management aid presents in the twenty-first century – and then narrow our analysis to the EUTF and recipient countries in Africa. We identify three pathways for how migration management aid impacts authoritarianism and repression and explain how we explore these pathways through four case studies: Kenya, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Finally, we preview the lessons that can be learned if policymakers continue to intertwine aid and migration management.

What is the evolving role of exile in modern Arabic literature? Drawing on Edward Said’s concept of contrapuntal reading and the shifting figure of the exilic intellectual, the chapter traces the transformation of exile from a symbol of intellectual estrangement and creative agency to a dynamic site of engagement with displacement, fragmentation, and identity, and points to the ways in which exile literature intersects with, yet remains distinct from, refugee and forced migration narratives. Focusing on Palestinian literature, particularly Rabai al-Madhoun’s Masaʾir, it analyzes how exile and return are reimagined in the post-Oslo era through fragmented narrative structures and intergenerational perspectives. The chapter argues that exile literature continues to offer critical insight into the lived experience of displacement, while also challenging rigid legal and national categories. Through its aesthetic innovations and political resonances, exile literature remains a vital mode of witnessing, resistance, and reimagining belonging in the contemporary Arab world.

This chapter argues that racial reckoning may mean something more to Black people than either awareness or accountability for racial inequality—it may mean material wellbeing. It tells the little-known story of 21st century Black migration away from traditional Back-identified urban spaces and suggests that these movements teach us a lot about the ingredients of racial reckoning according to Black households themselves. Millions have moved. The original research discussed here shows three trends rooted in affordability: involuntary displacement, local movement in search of better options and relocation by the most mobile for a reset of opportunities. Though some questions remain, the evidence of exodus shows how important local, state and democratic conditions are to a sense of Black wellbeing—and probably most Americans’.

Unlike nineteenth-century National Tales, Minerva’s earlier versions adapted the Romance structure that Natasha Tessone calls “the Inheritance Plot.” to argue against, or sometimes for, Union. Welsh, Irish, Scottish and American National Tales by Anna Maria Bennett, Maria Hunter, Eliza Parsons, Frances Jacson and many anonymous others puffed the superiority of the Celtic fringe over the corrupt and villainous English, celebrated the happiness of endogamous marriages and recommended retreating from England into harmonious local communities in one’s native Welsh, Irish or Scottish country or emigrating to America. Susannah Rowson and Charles Brockden Brown adapted the same formula to offer a bleaker view of the Early Republic. The second section shows that though episodes of wandering occurred in all genres (because central to Romance), stories titled Wanderers’ Tales highlighted the evils of homelessness, especially for young ladies, and debated the consequences of distance in a world where Britons were perpetually on the move.

This chapter examines what politicians know about donor activities in their constituencies and how donors affect their policy behavior. Extending the theory in Chapter 3, I show how foreign aid can distort policymaking when donors fail to adequately consult with or inform politicians about their activities. I then discuss an experiment with Malawian politicians involving their choices over the allocation of school resources. Consistent with the theory, I show that these allocation decisions were influenced by donor activities in their constituencies and politicians’ knowledge of those activities.

This chapter interrogates two misconceptions about Ngũgĩs early life and shows how his early years informed Ngũgĩ’s early writing. Ngũgĩ’s parents were not ahoi (tenants-at-will), as he once claimed. Drawing upon his recent memoirs and the ‘autobiographical moments’ in his later essay collections, I foreground Ngũgĩs birth ‘in a large peasant family’ and parse their diminishing property rights, from peasants with reasonably large land-holding to land-poor peasants who hired out their labour. I parse the family dynamics that inform Ngũgĩ’s investment in equity and communitarian values, and his emerging interest in oral storytelling and performance, coupled with a motivation to escape the trap of poverty through Western education. While Kamĩrĩĩthũ defined much of Ngũgĩ’s later work, it was not his birthplace. The dislocation to Kamĩrĩĩthũ during the Emergency (1955–9) anchored him in the primal scene of postcolonial Gĩkũyũ identity, but also nurtured an interest in theatre as a tool for community-building and carceral institutions more generally. Both the colonial school and the Emergency village became major settings for his early works. Ironically the recursive image of the train station at Limuru in A Grain of Wheat occurred to Ngũgĩ while on a train ride from Leeds to Scotland, uniting two planes of coloniality.

British imperial expansion reinforced expanded white supremacy from the late 1700s through the mid 1800s. Rather than weakening after the loss of American colonies, British concepts of racial superiority intensified through colonial encounters in India, Australia, and beyond. In India, British East India Company rule shifted from early trade partnerships to domination justified by claims of innate European superiority. In Australia, colonizers treated indigenous peoples as obstacles to be removed, implementing policies of displacement and ethnic cleansing in Tasmania. Meanwhile, emerging scientific disciplines like craniology provided justification for racial hierarchies, with researchers across Europe collaborating to measure and categorize human differences. Though the abolition of the slave trade (1807) and slavery (1833) in the British Empire marked significant humanitarian victories, these reforms did not challenge underlying assumptions of white supremacy. This period established enduring patterns of imperial rule based on presumed racial difference, whether through direct violence or supposedly benevolent administration.