A specific type of nationalism developed in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. It differed from New World nationalisms (in the tradition of George Washington, Toussaint Louverture and Simón Bolívar) in a number of respects. It was spearheaded to a large extent by writers, artists, and intellectuals (in the fields of cultural production and knowledge production) rather than by political and popular activists; as such it affected existing states and newly emergent nations alike; and its main impact was through the reconceptualization of the state, its self-image, and its institutions, rather than through popular mobilization. Its main tenet – that the state should reflect, and indeed be defined by, the ethnocultural nationality of its inhabitants – was applied in the Peace Treaties of 1919 as an overriding principle in international law (the peoples’ right to self-determination) and still informs our current assumption that the default state is the “nation-state.”

Despite the dependence of the American colonies on London for their supply of books and their literary style in the eighteenth century, literature functioned as a crucial catalyst of revolutionary fervor and national identity in the 1770s. This mobilisation of radical republican sentiment occurred both in the realm of non-fiction prose (most famously through Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense) and in poetry, from irreverent ‘carrier addresses’ published in local newspapers to high-toned ‘satires of the times’. The career of African American poet Phillis Wheatley offers a poignant example of the way British literary prestige and pro-revolutionary political expression were at cross-purposes during the revolutionary period. Writers like Wheatley unsettle the dominant cultural nationalist paradigm of American literary history, which sees political independence paving the way for American literary and cultural independence by the mid-nineteenth century, and instead point towards alternative conceptions of freedom in the imperial Atlantic world.

This is an overview chapter covering the entire chronology of the book and touching on the topics to which each individual chapter is devoted. It is important in that it outlines the main stages through which Welsh music passed and emphasises the causal relationship between the social, cultural and political history of Wales and its music, a recurrent theme in the book. It also explains the distinctiveness of Welsh music history and the structures and agencies that have made it so. While Welsh music before the nineteenth century had loose connections with the repertoires and style periods of other European cultures, Wales was devoid of major centres of cultural production of the type that enabled the music industry to thrive elsewhere. There was neither a metropolitan centre nor national institutions or agencies to give succour to a music culture similar to those of England, Scotland and Ireland. Two agencies filled this void from the later eighteenth century: a reconstituted version of the medieval eisteddfod, which changed its emphasis from being an essentially poetic to a primarily musical event, and the rise of religious nonconformity. Nonconformity was important for a number of reasons: it was a nationwide phenomenon but its emphasis was on the local, and it promoted engagement with congregational singing to such an extent that it fostered a remarkable level of democratic musical engagement more generally. These developments occurred simultaneously with a renewed interest in Welsh musical traditions. The twentieth century saw a new phase: the development of professionalism leading to distinctive voices in art and popular music. Amidst this entire story was the status and influence of the Welsh language, a topic that also receives close attention in the chapter.

“Narrating Postcolonial Nigeria” sets the pace for Understanding Modern Nigeria by providing backgrounds to the both the existing and emerging narratives of Nigeria as a state, especially as it navigates its post/modern manifestation. This discourse takes on the various explications of postcolonialism to contextualize the narrativity broadly and adequately, and provide an understanding of Nigeria through a diachronic examination of its conception and projections. From literature and history in the humanities to economics and politics in the social sciences, this chapter focuses on how postcolonial temperaments differ (and align) across fields, regions, and histories of Nigeria, and, of course, how they contribute to the overarching narratives of how Nigeria is grappling with its postcolonial and post/modern transitions. Providing a summation to the issues, challenges, and solutions engaged in Understanding Modern Nigeria, this chapter provides insight into the most dominant narrative preoccupations of postcolonial Nigeria, among which are ethnicity, governance, democracy, and development. These interconnected frames explain the complications that shape the daily lives of Nigerians, but most importantly, create spaces for purposive reframing which help to channel an enabling path toward an enhanced development of Nigeria within the order of globality, especially as Nigeria plays a major role within the broader frame of Africa.

Lisa Lowe’s 1991 essay “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences,” published in Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, argued for the profound generativity of the concept of difference in cultural politics. By instead characterizing Asian American racial formation and its cultures through the terms heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity, Lowe challenged the orientalist binaries that had for so long constricted considerations of Asian American culture. Because difference could generate affiliation and expansion, rather than unity, closure, and finitude, it would become a new starting point for apprehending minority cultures outside of the dominant frameworks of national inclusion and normative citizenship. This essay uses the frameworks of “recovery,” “reckoning,” and “remediation” to structure a discussion of the impact of Lisa Lowe’s work, and particularly the insights offered by her 1991 “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity” essay, on the field of Asian American studies.

Revisiting Sau-Ling Wong’s Reading Asian American Literature, this chapter posits its key terms of Necessity and Extravagance, which counterbalance tendencies toward freedom with the force of constraint, as analytics toward apprehending a larger Asian American(ist) economy where work and play traffic in the circulation and distribution of energy, value, and desire. Asian American(ist) economy names two interdependent modes of operations. The first operates descriptively, mapping the economy of activities, attachments, and resources that undergird the racial formation of Asian America. The second manifests itself prescriptively through attempts by racial projects to articulate the cathexis of energies toward specific objectives, defining the work that “Asian American” can and should do. Centering Necessity and Extravagance reassesses Asian American literary debates around texts, contexts, and inter-texts wherein Extravagance becomes bound to anxieties about excess: libidinal, theoretical, and capitalist. Necessity and Extravagance provide valuable methods for contending with such excesses alongside shifting permutations of race and Asian Americanness from 1965 to 1996.

Instead of assuming it as a given or an inherent good, this chapter examines cross-racial solidarity in Asian American literature through an emphasis on what historian David Roediger calls “productive uneasiness over solidarity.” It focuses on three flashpoints of racial consciousness: (1) post-civil rights reckonings of Japanese American incarceration, (2) the cultural nationalist search for Asian American identity, and (3) reflections on the Asian American social and political position after the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. These flashpoints encouraged Asian American writers to envision commonalities across racial difference and notice singularities that bespeak the construction of Asian racial difference. Asian American literature’s “productive uneasiness over solidarity” appears in the process of seeing and articulating these commonalities and singularities, not as fixed products but as fluctuating and shifting processes. As writers ask probing questions about Asian American identities and identification, Asian American literature brings into focus both a historical Black–white racial binary and a new but vexing multiculturalism as the fulcra of imagining cross-racial solidarity.

Published in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior instantly became a field-defining work. This chapter examines how this genre-bending text, together with its long critical afterlife, has become one of the most influential pieces in Asian American literature. How has literary criticism on The Woman Warrior responded to and at the same time shaped the contours of Asian American literary studies? How does Kingston’s book speak to contemporary concerns within Asian American literature and culture? How did Kingston’s text set the terms, for better or for worse, of Asian American feminisms? Finally, should we still be reading, teaching, and studying The Woman Warrior four decades later? Looking back at The Woman Warrior and the vast field of scholarship surrounding it more than forty years later helps the reader understand some of the defining moments and questions in the now-recognizable Asian American literary archive during the course of its formation, development, and transition.

The chapter explores the genre situation in Norway around the time of Ibsen’s debut, probing the question of why Ibsen chose to write within the genre of drama in his pursuit of a literary career. Particular political and cultural circumstances are relevant here: After centuries of foreign rule, the Norwegian cultural field was small and undeveloped when the country took up the impulses of national romanticism. In this situation, the theatre became an institution of political and cultural prestige, and constituted a forum for a cultural and literary debate that was still largely lacking in the printed press. Furthermore, the genre of drama was largely untarnished by the associations of sentimentality and femininity that still attached to the prose genres, and especially the novel. As for lyric poetry, it was a genre still not in line with the artistic ideals of romanticism, drawing heavily on classicist aesthetics, and particularly so after the death of the romantic poet Henrik Wergeland in 1845. Hence, drama would have appeared a safe genre for å budding poet, a genre that was modern, masculine, national and even potentially profitable.

The conventional account of anglophone Caribbean writing from the nationalist period often tends to focus on male writers. Early articulations of a Caribbean literary tradition overlooked many writers, especially women, who did not fit into the frameworks of canon-builders like Kamau Brathwaite and Kenneth Ramchand. Almost up to the end of the 1970s, Jean Rhys remained the single widely known woman author, while a generation of writers who were arguably closer to changing Caribbean realities were neglected. During the past twenty years, scholarship on Caribbean writing has sought to recuperate these writers and take seriously their contributions, addressing how these might challenge conventional accounts of Caribbean literary cultures and characteristics. The result has been an expanded sense of the aesthetic and political projects of the period – a period marked by significant sociopolitical change in countries increasingly asserting cultural specificities and moving towards political autonomy. This essay focuses on five early anglophone Caribbean women writers of diverse backgrounds: Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Amy Jacques Garvey, Una Marson, Elma Napier, and Sylvia Wynter. While making different aesthetic choices, these authors gave passionate voice to the dominant concerns of their time – in particular the anticolonial struggle, socioeconomic disparities, and racial/cultural identity – as well as articulating issues of gender.

“The Universal Wilderness” argues that environmentalist appeals to self-dissolution constitute a uniquely universal form of identity politics. It does so by situating these appeals in the context of identity-based movements that flourished in the 1970s through a reading of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977). The novel pointedly juxtaposes two characters: one who caricatures the era’s Black nationalism and another who identifies with the ecological intricacy of his environment. This arrangement effects a comparison between two accounts of authenticity: the racial and the ecological, the particular and the universal. Such a reading enables a reevaluation of certain facets of postwar environmentalism. Appeals to self-dissolution join the rhetoric of authenticity that characterized Black Power with the sort of political universalism that such movements called into question. However, though Morrison represents ecology as a universal condition, she also critiques the notion that it might constitute an identity position. That position might serve only to enshrine as universal the colonial attitudes of white men, erasing the perspectives of women and people of color.

This chapter moves the reputation of Gerald Griffin’s The Collegians outside a predominantly Catholic context and argues that the transnational dimensions of the novel connect local with global forces. Griffin’s depiction of multicultural Catholic characters suggests a shifting version of Irish identity that can be constructed outside of morality and religion. The chapter highlights the cultural and political moments that shaped Griffin’s standing and suggests new ways of framing his achievements. It also shows Griffin was phased out of an emerging nationalist narrative of Irish literature, in part via the political reception of William Carleton in nationalist and Fenian newspapers of the 1840s. Meanwhile the movements in academic criticism in the 1960s that rescued Dion Boucicault from obscurity had the effect of reducing Griffin’s reputation to the creator of the Colleen Bawn.