This chapter explores the various ways in which the legacy of Rodgers and Hammerstein continues in the twenty-first century. It discusses notable high-profile revivals of Carousel, Oklahoma!, The King and I and South Pacific as well as new versions of Flower Drum Song and Cinderella that appeared on Broadway. It discusses the business of Rodgers and Hammerstein, including the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization becoming part of Imagem, then Concord. The appearance of songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein in television commercials is explored in terms of both content and licensing. The continued popularity of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals in amateur productions as well as in professional international productions, often in translation, is also covered.

The shairi is the genre of Swahili poetry characterized by an incredible versatility. For more than 200 years, it has traveled across media, from dance poetry to manuscripts in Arabic script, radio programs, WhatsApp groups, and school curricula; it has spilled over into hip-hop lyrics. It encompasses poems that have often been treated as belonging to mutually exclusive categories, like “traditional,” “modern,” and “popular,” and associated with different temporalities, spaces, and actors. Thus, as the chapter shows, the shairi lends itself to think about genre as a flexible frame. It zeros in on its capacity to be constituted in dynamic relations, defined by but also defining changing social worlds. By drawing on “historical poetics,” the chapter shows the multiple intersecting ancestries of the genre, sometimes forgotten sometimes rearticulated, that account for the genre’s flexibility. The genre’s critical potential lies particularly in challenging persisting notions of a teleological literary history.

Fiction writing in the Hausa language started in the colonial period, and continued in the post-independence period with most novels written by men. The 1980s marked a watershed moment for Hausa literature with the emergence of new female writers. Popular Hausa fiction, known as Kano Market Literature soon followed, taking the form of print novellas often divided into numbered parts dealing with a variety of themes, including love, polygamy, and socioeconomic challenges. Subsequently, writers’ clubs were established as were radio programs devoted to serialization of Hausa novels. The emergence of the internet in the late 1990s further transformed Hausa fiction. Digital technology and social media platforms, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Wattpad, made it possible to share fiction, and websites dedicated to buying and/or borrowing fiction sprang up. This chapter traces the emergence and development of Hausa literature by assessing the political economy of production, distribution, and consumption through new forms of distribution via the radio and the internet. The use of various technologies for disseminating Hausa literature calls into question the assumption that Hausa fiction can survive only in print form.

Within the last two decades, the specialized term “chara” has gained recognition for denoting fictional beings that seem typical for Japanese popular media. Usually, a distinction is made that charas – distinguished from “characters” – are somehow independent of the narrative. Since the term emerged in a variety of different discourses, however, it serves many contradictory functions. This chapter maps different ways to conceptualize the protagonists of Japanese popular culture as charas with regard to the popular franchise Demon Slayer (Kimetsu no Yaiba). It introduces four relevant oppositions: “consequentiality versus cartoonishness,” “representational realism versus ludic realism,” “narrative consumption versus database consumption,” and “authorized works versus secondary productions.” What connects all these vastly different meanings of charas and the respective “other sides of narrative” is a shared interest in characters not as parts of closed, fictional stories or worlds but as nodal points of historically changing media practices and conventionalized modes of imagination and participation.

Chapter 2 revises some seminal definitions of ‘genre’ and key conceptualisations in genre theory, such as ‘genres as frames for social action’, ‘intended audiences’ and ‘communicative purpose(s)’. The intention is to introduce and reflect upon recent conceptualisations of web-mediated generified activity – for example, ‘genre remediation’, ‘transmediality’, ‘polycontextuality’ and ‘context collapse’, among others – from the perspective of structuration theory. This chapter also expands on Swales’s understanding of metaphors of genre to critically address the aspects of generic evolution, hybridisation and change. The chapter also critically reflects on the concepts of ‘language collusion’ and ‘language collisions’ and draws on the metaphors of genre(s) and language(s) ecologies to explain the emergence of new genres on the web, the evolution of traditional genres, the interdependence between traditional and new genres and, more importantly, the creation of complex genre assemblages that support multilingual science communication on Web 2.0.