The conclusion surveys the core interventions of the book: its conceptual and methodological work to open new pathways in African intellectual history beyond decolonisation through postcolonial civil wars to the present, among working-class migrants and war-displaced people, within the multiple discursive worlds (at home, in Sudan, and globally) accessible to them. This chapter challenges atheoretical interpretations of southern and South Sudanese politics, reasserting the place of political imagination in this history and demanding close engagement with everyday conversations over political ethnicity, wealth, class, and power. The chapter ends with a reflection based on conversations over 2015–23 with many of the same activists, teachers, and writers in South Sudan, on opportunities lost, and on continuing projects of political creativity today. As a history in the aftermath, the project was built during a time of a loss of optimism and political freedom, and is currently a history of possibilities lost.

The treason trials after 1945 were shaped by Norway’s particular experience of German occupation. The central importance of Nasjonal Samling to German Nazification efforts in Norway meant that those planning for a post-war reckoning soon focused their attention on how to criminalise the actions of party members. This chapter outlines the course of the Norwegian occupation, including the manifold actions on the part of Norwegian citizens that would later give rise to punishment. It details how the exile government in London and the resistance forces in Norway jointly prepared the legal groundwork for the post-war reckoning. In doing so, this chapter highlights the reasoning behind the introduction of the extraordinary legal provisions that would both determine the course of the trials and cause significant controversy after the war.

This chapter examines the post-WWII era where the idea of exclusive Convention Peoples Party (CPP) radicalism and Pan-Africanism rests most thickly. It argues that debates about the CPP’s Citizenship Act complexifies its pan-African credentials. Also, the CPP’s political philosophy was not radical and distinct compared to its opponents, as it fits within a broad liberal/ cosmopolitan tradition rooted in Europe and America. So-called conservatives were oftentimes more radical, as shown in parliamentary debates on the “Motion of Destiny.” Contentious discussions about whether to achieve self-government by proclamation or negotiation, are obscured by the dyad of radical versus conservative. Debates about federalism, regionalism, and unitary government remain unexplored because the grand narrative rebukes the opponents of Kwame Nkrumah’s socialist agenda, while granting him hero status. Nkrumah’s prolific writing and the squeezing out of his opponents after he became Prime Minister in 1957 are identified as the architects of Ghana’s grand narrative.

This chapter analyses the political and social dynamics that unfolded in Norway following the country’s liberation on 8 May 1945 and how these shaped the contours of the treason trials in the long term. At the political level, it demonstrates, the early consensus between the returning exile government and the resistance forces in Norway on the topic of the trials was a key reason as to why they were largely implemented according to plan. At the social level, the swift commencement of the trials satisfied a strong public demand and was deemed a requirement for securing a peaceful transition period. The final section of the chapter details the public pressure felt by representatives of the Norwegian Parliament (Storting) in July 1945 as they debated and passed some of the basic instruments of the trials, most notably an act approving of the use of the death penalty.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is presented as a portal to more liberative realities, but its broad implications for society and certain groups in particular require more critical examination. This chapter takes a specifically Black theological perspective to consider the scepticism within Black communities around narrow applications of AI as well as the more speculative ideas about these technologies, for example general AI. Black theology’s perpetual push towards Black liberation, combined with womanism’s invitation to participate in processes that reconstitute Black quality of life, have perfectly situated Black theological thought for discourse around artificial intelligence. Moreover, there are four particular categories where Black theologians and religious scholars have already broken ground and might be helpful to religious discourse concerning Blackness and AI. Those areas are: white supremacy, surveillance and policing, consciousness and God. This chapter encounters several scholars and perspectives within the field of Black theology and points to potential avenues for future theological areas of concern and exploration.

A look at Spartan commemoration in the Peloponnesian War, focusing on Brasidas and the rhetoric of liberation. Brasidas was a new kind of Spartan that put freedom in the forefront, which led to Brasidas receiving more lavish commemoration but also drew Sparta into more wars.

A study of Agesilaus and his Penhellenism and mission to "free the Greeks" of Asia. Agesilaus wanted to be commemorated as a liberator well outside of Sparta, which was a major contributor to Sparta’s decline as increased wars weakened Sparta irreparably.

Critical consciousness, or the process of coming to understand and combat oppression, is an integral aspect of adolescents’ sociopolitical development and is necessary for collective liberation. Although adolescents interface with oppression daily, little is known about how they engage in critical consciousness or how this process manifests across different situations and contexts. In this chapter, we propose a conceptual model and research agenda aimed at capturing this complexity. Specifically, we argue that daily diary studies would be well positioned to examine the finer-grained temporal nature of critical consciousness and intraindividual variability. We provide an overview of how daily diaries might be applied to the study of critical consciousness. Additionally, we discuss implications for research, practice, and policy.

This chapter completes the story of Giorgio Amendola (and his wife Germaine) and his communist brothers: the independent Antonio (who died young in 1953) and the orthodox Pietro. After an account of Giorgio as a fighting partisan, or an organiser of fighting partisans, we move on to his history in the renamed Italian Communist Party after 1945. We examine his role in the establishment of the Italian Republic in 1946–7 and the concentration Togliatti then expected from him on the South. The PCI’s slow detachment from Stalinism is also reviewed. Until his death, Giorgio could never bring himself to prefer American civilisation to Soviet. Nonetheless, he actively favoured the PCI policy of a national ‘Italian road to socialism’. The automatic succession of Luigi Longo to party leadership in 1964 dashed Giorgio’s hopes in that regard. By the 1970s, he had become a (massive) party elder, with time to write his deeply humane memoirs. He died on 5 June 1980, Germaine following him to the grave within hours; she had become a well-regarded painter and the two were always thought to be engaged in their deeply romantic love story. They were given public and family burial in the Campo Verano.

This chapter analyses the shape of liberation interpretation, emphasizing an alignment between the factors that constitute a liberationist hermeneutic of contemporary reception and the factors that constitute a liberationist hermeneutic of biblical text production.

This chapter introduces key concepts in postcolonial studies and discusses recent developments of postcolonial criticism within biblical studies, such as empire studies, liberation hermeneutics, and cultural studies, including materialist, race/ethnicity, feminist, and queer approaches to empire and colonialism.

“Days of Friendship, Hope, and Waiting,” focuses on the period from 6 to 10 June 1944, when the paratroopers and villagers bonded over their mutual desire for liberation and victory. Under the direction of Major Johnston and Captain Brummitt, the paratroopers built a strong perimeter defense around Graignes and carried out aggressive patrolling in the surrounding area. Captain Abraham Sophian, the battalion surgeon, set up a medical aid station. The villagers, especially the leading women of the village, provided the support services the men needed to prepare for battle. At rest, the paratroopers exchanged stories and songs with the people of Graignes.

Textual accounts of the three knowledges by means of which the Buddha attained enlightenment are brief. The first two, recollection of former existences and of the passing away and arising of beings, prepared the way for the third, destruction of the “taints” (āsavas), mastery of which achieved liberation. The focus of this chapter is on what attainment of these three knowledges entails and on how a meditator could transition from the highly concentrated state of the fourth jhāna to recollection of former existences. A little-known text suggests that concentration must be relaxed just enough to allow the arising of a “reviewing-sign”, a process explained by means of appropriate similes. The discussion concludes that, like a charioteer at a crossroads, the appearance of this image confronts the meditator with a choice: whether to enter one of the Buddhist heavens; develop supernatural powers; or seek liberation through pereforming the meditative practices required to attain the three knowledges.

Chapter 2 begins thematically with survivors’ perceptions of freedom, exploring how survivors perceive slavery as a physical reality and freedom as a relative concept, drawing out themes of resistance, death, and education as freedom. It is argued that the simple binary conception of “free” and “not free” is an artificial one. Contrary to the belief that slavery is a constant, and that freedom is both an immediate and joyful escape from enslavement, micro freedoms occur and are assumed during slavery. Conversely, slavery continues in the mind of the free, leaving individuals in a permanent state of survival and undermining the realisation of meaningful, and what Frederick Douglass called “full,” freedom.

Watch Night began when enslaved and free African Americans kept vigil, to sing and pray, on December 31, 1862, as they awaited news in the morning of the Emancipation Proclamation. Their optimism gave way to the nominal freedoms and rights of citizenship that African American families and communities experienced in the wake of emancipation and during Reconstruction. African American writers of these decades introduce descriptions of African landscapes, customs, values, and histories as metaphors for the uncertain status and tentative futures their people confronted after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. They associate the African continent with a variety of meanings: the brutal history of slavery; the erasure or dismissal of influential cultures and intellects; a persistent legacy of resistance to oppression and rebellion against bondage; the fugitive status of African Americans in their own country and as exiles abroad; and the precarity of racial progress even as Black schools, churches, and other self-sufficient institutions are established by formerly enslaved Black southern communities.

Chapter 7 concludes by reiterating the invisible ontologies that haunt current assessments of black skin. The fluid construction of black skin in ancient Greek literature and art aims to confront limiting treatment of race in the modern academy. A final glimpse at the poetry of Langston Hughes (1931) and Gwendolyn Brooks (1980) offers a suggestive model for revamping the ancient Greek archive in the twenty-first century.