In societies that rely on the economic framework of consumer capitalism, materialistic values, whereby individuals place high importance on acquiring money and material goods to improve well-being and status, tend to be rife. Materialistic values, however, negatively impact human health and well-being. One way in which they do this is by facilitating environmental degradation. Psychological research demonstrates that strong materialistic values can directly lead to lower levels of physical and mental health. In contrast to the problems presented by materialistic values and lifestyles, flow experiences, whereby people are completely immersed in an activity, may offer a means of limiting environmental violence and enhancing human well-being. The benefits of flow for well-being are well documented within the field of positive psychology. Further, research is beginning to show that flow may be able to support sustainable outcomes by occurring in activities with low environmental costs and encouraging stronger self-transcendent values. This chapter reviews the evidence to show that materialistic values support environmental violence before considering how flow experiences can offer an antidote that would allow us to reduce environmental violence and to live better and more sustainably. In doing so, practical recommendations are made for how to encourage flow experiences across society.

This chapter explains how and why Topsy – a “little negro girl” featured in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) – became a symbol of artificial life during the long wake of slave emancipation in the United States. It begins by recontextualizing Stowe’s abolitionist melodrama in relation to arguments about human–machine difference in the industrial North. Because the automated Black slave girl was a perfect foil to the autonomous white man, Topsy could critique slavery while affirming the race and gender hierarchies of white bourgeois society. Turning to the material history of plush “Topsy” dolls – the handicraft of enslaved women turned into factory-made commodities – the chapter argues that Topsy as doll gained its cultural power as a reaction to fears of Black autonomy in the South and white automatization in the North. It concludes by considering Topsy’s unruly afterlife in the “technopoetics” of Black modernism in the Jazz Age.

Chapter 3 reads Ronan Bennett’s The Catastrophist, a Graham Greene-style thriller set in Lumumba’s Congo, and Anne Enright’s The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, a neohistorical romance set in nineteenth-century Paraguay. Bennett’s work unsettles late imperial English realist conventions to contest the apolitical apathy that characterizes much contemporary fiction about Africa and offers a related critique of Irish revisionism. Enright’s experimental novel explores the meaning of ‘female adventure’ and ‘emancipation’ in a catastrophic wartime setting. Both novels express anxieties about whether the novel as form can offer something more than just passive or compromised testimonies to violence in the Global South. In both instances, new modes of Irish political fiction struggle to release themselves from inherited colonial discourses.