Moving away from the grassroots version of events, this chapter explores the official colonial narratives created about the 1935 rebellions and the nature of British imperialism, arguing that the colonial government essentially operated as an extension of the sugar estates. Because of the entrenchment of racial stereotypes, the cross-racial cooperation fundamental to the rebellions seemed implausible to colony officials and was therefore rendered invisible. This chapter demonstrates the racial and ideological anxieties of colonialism itself and the global fractures within the British Empire during this period, where activists made connections between fascism and colonialism.

‘Irish Fiction and Migration in the Long Twenty-First Century’ observes that while migration has been a topic prominent in Irish fiction since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, more recent novels have considered the Irish subject overseas as a product of what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘liquid modernity’, migrants in a world characterised by neoliberalism and globalisation. The chapter considers works of outward migration in the long twenty-first century, beginning with William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey (1994) and extending to later works, such as Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009) and E. M. Reapy’s Red Dirt (2016), as well as historical fiction including Roddy Doyle’s Oh, Play That Thing (2004). The flows of migration into Ireland are also considered, in relation to Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015), Oona Frawley’s Flight (2014), and Donal Ryan’s Strange Flowers (2020), concluding that recent Irish diasporic fiction is characterised by multiple displacements.

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.

This chapter systematically moves through the key questions of critique as a mode of building and improving knowledge in the humanities. It surveys key works in the conversation in relation to a variety of critical conversations and traditions, relating the questions of critique to major projects and goals in the field.

This chapter looks at Romani migration to the Americas from a Canadian vantage point. It illuminates the continuities of transatlantic mobilities that have been peppered by moments of heightened visibility, a dynamic conditioned primarily by the interactions of kinship networks with the administrative state. One such visible moment was the arrival of Romani asylum seekers from Central and Eastern Europe to Canada in the early 2000s. The chapter places this episode into a wider migration context and, rather than foregrounding the singularity of this moment, it foregrounds the persistence of a Romani presence on the North American continent through less mediated moments. Relying on extensive oral histories and ethnographic fieldwork, it shows that Romani lives and diasporic ties have not only been shaped by Atlantic geopolitics, local realities and the connections between families and individuals, but also by attempts to control their movements seen by some as disorderly and dangerous.

Chapter 1 introduces the study’s five social categories (languages, religions, ethnicities, ethno-nations, and tribes) and their expressions in modern Iran. It explains multiple theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding these diverse types of people. It describes Iran’s positioning in the Persian Gulf region and compares its societies and cultures with those of neighboring countries. Refugees entering Iran include people fleeing from recent wars and conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Millions of Iranians emigrated since 1978, often motivated by the Islamic theocracy’s repressions. These emigrants reconfigured their identities as participants in the large, dispersed global diaspora of Iranians.

This chapter explores the Jewish American literature of Los Angeles by contrasting it with the more prominent Jewish literary traditions of New York and Chicago. Birns delves into the complexities of Jewish life in the city as represented in the works of Harris Newmark, Aben Kandel, Nathanael West, Budd Schulberg, and Eve Babitz. He also addresses the contributions of genre fiction writers like Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, Rochelle Krich, and Walter Mosley, and concludes by considering the differing approaches to history and memory offered in prose by Gina Nahai and Harry Turtledove, and in poetry by Boris Dralyuk. Birns suggests that, while the Jewish literary tradition of Los Angeles may not have commanded a level of attention to match those of other American metropolises, it is a powerfully future-facing tradition, resisting assimilative impulses and engaging consistently with multicultural and diasporic paradigms.

This chapter presents relationships between processes of both internal and international migration as a signature feature of Los Angeles literature. Through works by Facundo Bernal, Carlos Bulosan, Laila Lalami, and Nayomi Munaweera, Manizza Roszak reflects upon LA’s status a node of global migration. In the works of John Fante, Walter Mosley, Michele Serros, Charles Yu, Percival Everett, and Tommy Pico, meanwhile, questions of transnationality still surface, but are recontextualized by processes intranational migration both historical and contemporary – reflecting LA’s longstanding image as a destination of promise and opportunity. When racial or ethnic marginality inflects experience of the city, however, hopes for renewal and self-remaking rapidly turn to disappointment and frustration. Nevertheless, inter-diasporic solidarities remain.

Weisong Gao identifies complex and ambivalent constructions of and reflections upon “home” as constituting a frame through which Los Angeles’s rich Asian American literary history can be understood. In Gao’s chapter, home is a sensory experience, felt in the body. Focusing on writers including Steph Cha, Hisaye Yamamoto, Lisa See, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Nina Revoyr, Gao interrogates complexities of cultural belonging and identity, and locates cross-racial tensions and solidarities, across a breadth of LA’s diverse Asian American literatures. Gao contends that while “Asian American” was a category initially created and defined in political terms, a sensory lens both enables a critical interrogation of that category and offers a means reaching deeper, more affectively, and more sophisticatedly into the complexities of Asian American history, experience, and relationality that LA literature manifests.

This chapter returns to a problem that continues to haunt and inform the study of Africa in modernity and modernism: What is the role of the aesthetic in the constitution of African imaginaries? While the starting point for this chapter is the problematic relationship between the African subject and dominant European ideas about race and blackness in the modern period, the chapter provides a critical account of how literature and art were deployed not so much as a play of forms, styles, and affects embedded in the African imagination, but as a mode of thought, one that challenged dominant Eurocentric ideas about Africans as a people without the capacity for reason and aesthetic judgment. This chapter returns to controversial debates about Négritude in African art and thought, arguing that this much-maligned movement was an important aesthetic ideology, a powerful counterpoint to the image of Africa as an unmodern subject. In the end, debates surrounding Négritude call attention to how African writers and critics embraced literature as a venue and method for simultaneously challenging particular European ideas about Africa while questioning nationalist desires for a unanimous African identity.

This chapter studies the 2020 photo-essay “A Primordial Culture” by Sri Lankan Canadian multidisciplinary artist Rajni Perera. It centers Perera’s work as the basis of a theory of divine adornment as a creative response to climate catastrophe. Such a theory is derived from an investment in thinking alongside Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of ornamentalism and demonstrates how forms of ornament might be complicated and utilized differently in response to Perera’s lone figure roaming unknown terrain following planetary collapse. The chapter weaves in discussions of both the photographs of Perera’s adorned traveler figure and her writing as a mode of describing a future world deeply rooted in, and indebted to, Indigenous, ancient, and anti-colonial feminist cosmologies.

How do poets participating in a Black poetry community navigate between collective purpose and creative individuality, with respect to both political and artistic goals? This chapter engages this and related questions, offering an account of Cave Canem as a resource and force within contemporary Black poetry – but not in an institutional history. My focus here is not the foundation that has been an engine of empowerment and an influential player in the world of twenty-first-century American literature, but rather the ongoing, dynamic gathering of writers that describes itself as “a home for Black poetry.” What can we learn by constructing an aesthetic history of this organization? This effort will lay the groundwork for future scholarship that can more thoroughly explore what Cave Canem demonstrates about the power of collective action and mutual support to change culture, as well as the gravitational pull of the culturally familiar.

U.S. empire depends upon the logics of sexual normativity for their natural-seemingness. As an epistemological project, US empire shapes our understanding of what sexuality means. This chapter offers that the history of American literature and empire reveal how sexuality is inherently political, that desire is itself part of the political world; its contours are filtered through the relations of race and power that operate in the public sphere. There is a lot we don’t know about sexuality: it is too amorphous a collection of acts, desires, fantasies, and ideas to claim dominion over. What we know, however, is that US empire’s remapping of power relations, norms, identities, and territory operates with and through the desires we hold to be most intimate, and that American literary study is key to better understanding the sexual scope of empire’s reach.

This chapter establishes the spirituals as the bedrock of African American poetry to characterize the tradition as inherently innovative from its origins to the present. It challenges the standard claim that African American poetry begins with texts written by enslaved persons reflecting familiarity with canonical British poetry. In this approach, criticism has generally considered African American poetry in dialogue with the mainstream canon, whether emulating or criticizing its values. Privileging written texts in conventional forms has resulted in devaluing poetry reflecting characteristics such as orality, performance, anonymity, and communal collaboration. It also results in wide acceptance of an African American poetry canon that historically has overlooked the innovative nature of this genre from its origins and an ensuing tradition of avant-garde poetry. From this biased perspective, the spirituals have been overlooked as the genesis of African American poetry, even though that is their rightful place. Viewing the spirituals as the true foundation of this tradition implies shifting some assumptions not just about these poems, but about the place and meaning of originality.

This chapter starts from the proposition that both poetry and diaspora entail ways of configuring relationships between the general and the particular that may deviate from dominant philosophical tendencies. Without assuming a uniformly shared style or way of thinking, I argue for diaspora as the name of a common historical situation for people of African descent. Noting the concept’s emergence in the 1960s as an alternative to and continuation of older configurations of Pan-Africanism, the chapter then offers brief sketches of some key figures – Kamau Brathwaite, Dionne Brand, and M. NourbeSe Philip – and their relationships to language, gender, and politics.

For poets Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, and Jayne Cortez, jazz indexes a series of paradoxes and contradictions beyond standard accounts of the music and, in turn, beyond standard accounts of jazz poetry. In Joans’s live collaboration with saxophonist Archie Shepp We Have Come Back, the multiple versions of Kaufman’s ‘War Memoir’, and Cortez’s ‘If the Drum Is a Woman’, jazz reveals contradictions of racial, gendered, and national belonging in the Black Arts Movement era. These poems do not simply imitate jazz rhythms, but conceive jazz as a social form, part of the raced, classed, and sexed negotiations of bohemian community. Jazz becomes a way of thinking about practices of listening, about the way that art and cultural practices encapsulate the values of overlapping communities, and about the way that such practices serve as contested terrain. Drawing both prosodic energy and symbolic strength from jazz, these are also poems about jazz, about the stakes of listening to, consuming, appropriating, and appreciating the music, and about its role in the complex politics of the eras of McCarthyism, decolonisation, and the renewed rise of Black art.