The chapter illuminates diverse musical encounters or engagements between ‘minority’ cultures and what was, until recently, an Anglo-Australian majority over four periods of social, cultural and political foment between the pre-Federation colonial era and the present. It first examines the pre-WWI musical contributions of German-speaking residents and visitors, and Italian and Jewish influence on musical entertainment in the inter-war and post-war era. It then considers how, from the 1980s, the twin forces of local multiculturalism and ‘world music’ intersected in Australia to foster a wealth of musical diversity, including creative musical interventions and experimentations. We also consider the many multi-faceted present-day music ‘scenes’ associated with diasporic communities by honing into the local world of Indonesia-related music-making in Australia. Music of minority cultures tends to become articulated through uneven power relationships with the majority culture and its institutions, but the chapter provides a more nuanced view of this relationship. It demonstrates, for example, how ‘minority’ musicians have strategically deployed the ‘power’, or value, of ‘difference’ for professional or other advantage, exploiting opportunities provided by the mainstream, which can simultaneously shape and even redefine minority music.

This chapter addresses the need for clarity of definition and identifies the various fields in which hybridity operated in the Greek world. Recent work in monster theory emphasizes the role of monsters in policing the borders of what is normative. Monsters have repeatedly been interpreted as threats to the order created by classification. Hybrids are better understood not as threats to order, but as expressions of anomaly. As a mode of cultural production hybrids are a means of coping with that which defies neat classification. This may veer towards the monstrous, as in the case of the demonic female figure, the gorgon, but equally it can tend towards the curious and the wondrous, like Pegasos alighting at the Peirene Fountain in Corinth or the horses of Achilles grieving for the death of Patroklos. In trying to understand how and why the Greeks generated hybrids in their mythology it may seem that we are putting the Greeks on the psychiatrist’s couch, but Freud’s conception of the Uncanny sheds some light on how hybrids function. They represent the challenge of the anomalous.

The Introduction outlines the theoretical framework, starting with a review of the existing literature on musical modernism, global musicology and related theories, including discussions of universalism, methodological nationalism, the centre versus periphery paradigm, multiple modernities, hybridity and postcolonial and decolonising approaches. It further introduces the interdisciplinary concept of ‘entangled histories’, which is illustrated with three short cases studies: the Orchesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos (OEIN) from Bolivia, the Bow Project from South Africa and Uwalmassa, a trio creating ‘deconstructed gamelan music’ from Jakarta, Indonesia. What unites these cases is that they are rooted in local traditions, rather than on the adoption or imposition of Western practices, although they undoubtedly respond creatively to Western ideas.

This concluding chapter showcases the ways that rivers and their stories bound stories and places across the ages, despite very tangible changes to the environmental and urban contexts of Europe post 1000. These stories helped people on the other end of the year 1000 shift to negotiate, as had Ausonius and Fortunatus, between change and continuity, past and present. It starts with a discussion of a thirteenth century artwork, the Metz ceiling, connecting it to Late Antique and early medieval ideas of hybrid animals, hybrid identities, and other kinds of barrier crossing in and around water. It concludes with an exploration of the encyclopedic Liber Floridus (c. 1100) as hybrid/composite text. How did its author use the stories of the past? How did artists and authors in the Central Middle Ages assess and assemble the inherited ideas about rivers and their relation to human identity? Just as rivers are continually reshaped yet (mostly) endure, their stories and uses shift over time, yet persist. There is always a riverscape that is shaping contemporary cultures that are also looking back to the past to find meaning in nature.

This chapter places race and disability in dialogue to highlight the complex, often contradictory, negotiations of exclusionary discourse within sensation narratives of the 1860s. The first half of the chapter discusses Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The ital Octoroon (1861–62), as a sensational text which places issues of race center stage and demonstrates how racial rhetoric is encoded through melodrama. Through exploiting the heightened topicality of racial questions in the midst of public discussions about the American Civil War, the novel exposes contradictory constructions of racial difference in the decade and implicitly displaces and elides British imperial violence. Issues of miscegenation and hybridity are analyzed in relation to the “octoroon fever” of the 1860s, before moving to a consideration of the ways in which contemporary discourses of race and mental disability converge in the slave figure, Tristan. The final part of the chapter extends this analysis of the constitutive relationship of race and disability in two of Wilkie Collins’s major novels of this no quote marks. Ital. all titles decade, Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868).

The Caribbean poet and playwright Derek Walcott was an early and heretofore relatively unrecognized exemplar for Seamus Heaney, who began reading Walcott in the 1960s and continued engaging with his work his entire career. Walcott’s example enabled Heaney to realize that he could be true to his mixed and multiple linguistic, cultural, literary, and political inheritances, and further, that dwelling amongst such identities could be a position of poetic strength. This essay shows how Walcott confirmed Heaney’s penchant for memorializing historical atrocities committed against members of minority communities across the “Black and Green Atlantic.” At the same time, Walcott’s nuanced poetry modeled how Heaney might enrich and complicate his poetry of witness by seeking rapprochement with such perpetrators through registering their common humanity through their local language. Walcott’s poetic integrity thus influenced Heaney’s continuing attempts to draw on the divisive conflict in Northern Ireland by exploring how literature might not linger on the wound of racialized resentment but finally transcend that situation and ascend into a condition akin to Walcottian song.

This chapter explores hybridity by exploring the figure of the Minotaur in the context of a number of similar ancient creatures, such as the centaurs and satyrs, and of the god of shepherds, flocks, and the wild: Pan. It illustrates that the peculiar hybridity of the Minotaur and the ancient story explaining his genesis raise questions about the scope and limits of human intervention into the realm of nature. It shows that, rather than exploring the limits of the human in positive ways, the figure of the Minotaur manifests the monstrous consequences of human transgression.

This chapter revolves around the famous story of how the Greeks managed to get into the city of Troy concealed in a gigantic wooden horse – and thus won a long and drawn-out war. The chapter follows this story and dismantles the odd human/animal hybrid at its core in the ultimate aim to explore how notions of animality define the human at war. Moving away from the ‘othering’ at work in the previous chapter, this one illustrates an area of existence in which analogies between human and animal prevail. Fighting emerges as an area of life in which our animal side comes to the fore.

This chapter introduces the human as a question. It revolves around the figure of the Theban Sphinx and her interaction with Oedipus and traces her presence from the ancient world into the works of Sigmund Freud. The chapter invokes the Sphinx as a presence that both prompts and challenges the way we think the human. Oedipus’ troubled humanity stands at the intersection between his success in solving the Sphinx’s riddle and his apparent failure to understand how her words apply to his own existence. As such, the Sphinx’ intervention at Thebes exposes a deep-seated vulnerability at the core of the human condition – a vulnerability springing from the fact that while the riddle can be solved with the powers of reasoning, the human as a riddle remains enigmatic and beyond the application of logos.

This chapter traces the development in the United States of the lyric essay (and, peripherally, essayistic poetry), with a focus on three contemporary writers: Anne Carson, Annie Dillard, and Maggie Nelson. Beginning with competing definitions of this hybrid genre whose contours are not always easy to discern, the chapter describes the role of American creative writing programs and the poetry classroom in the emergence of this special type of writing, which has gained ground in the early years of the twenty-first century. Examples from the lyric essays of Carson, Dillard, and Nelson are then read closely in an attempt to isolate the features unique to this genre celebrated by John D’Agata and Deborah Tall in their manifesto "New Terrain: The Lyric Essay" (1997).

The making new that is generally seen as definitive of modernist practice covers a range of different ambitions and dispositions. The same mindset is also evident in literary-modernist treatments of animals, despite claims that the "modernist animal" does not really exist. This chapter examines a range of modernist works that advance their own singular zoopoetic insights, through two principal approaches to modernist animal studies. The first, characterized by "invention," comprises the fantastic beasts of Herman Melville (the White Whale), W. B. Yeats (mythological, eschatological, and mechanical creatures), and Djuna Barnes (human-animal becomings), which turn on the notion of hybridity and its multivalent effects. The second, the domestic, is centered on cats and dogs in the works of Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway, Flush), T. S. Eliot (“Prufrock,” Old Possum’s), and James Joyce (Ulysses). Yet these domestic animals are anything but commonplace or pedestrian, in that they reveal the otherness at the heart of companion species. Literary-modernist animals are thus legion, and it is in the dialectic between the fantastic and the domestic that their distinctive particularities can best be understood.

This chapter discusses sub-Saharan Africa’s history with rock and metal, where Africa’s scenes are found today, and how those two genres have rooted themselves into the world’s ‘final frontier’ – whether it was during a difficult period of authoritarianism or through the organic passion of fans who found a genre that best represented their interest. As Africa’s various rock and metal scenes have unfolded during different periods in different countries under different circumstances, and continue to meet various challenges such as continued political strife, economic disparities and poorly developed infrastructures, this chapter also highlights what African metal bands sound like, the languages used in metal performances in Africa, and what if any local sounds and instrumentation acts are infusing (or, are they paying homage to their Western heroes?). Though the genres’ introduction into the African continent has met various difficulties, and continues to do so, African heavy metal stories tell of music that is empowering performers and excited fans alike.

Modernist American writers and artists had multiple and often conflictual responses toward the many environmental issues that became a growing concern as a result of rapid modernization at the outset of the twentieth century. Few artists in the modernist period avowedly declared themselves to be environmentalists or subscribed to what came later to be defined as being “green.” This chapter examines methods used especially in recent years by scholars in studying the range of environmental matters of form and content in modernism. Close readings are provided of important texts by Zora Neale Hurston and John Steinbeck as examples of how to apply these ecocritical research methods.

It is the argument of this chapter that in the 1830s and 1840s, the pressure of memorialising old friends who had suffered or died with madness caused Wordsworth to write a kind of poetry that responded to (what he saw as) deformity. In the process, fraught with difficulty, he modified his epitaphic poetics: a series of memorials mixed the traits of his elegiac verse with those of his epitaphs and inscriptions.

Classical and medieval rhetorical theorists had many names for the figure of thought that we call ‘personification’ or prosopopoeia. This fundamentally hybrid figure occurs at the confluence of different kinds of discourse; definitions range across a spectrum from the ‘animate abstraction’ to the ‘person introduced to speak’. The essay explores the diverse rhetorical theory behind this figure. It then discusses the hybridity of this figure, and in particular its striking capacity for multivalency, change and even disintegration (paradiastole), in medieval vernacular narrative allegory. It focuses on Langland’s Piers Plowman, with reference to the figures Clergie, Patience, Conscience, Wil, Haukyn and Piers Plowman. Finally, the essay investigates another aspect of this hybridity that might seem counter-intuitive to readers who assume that prosopopoiae/personifications should have surface or even naturalistic narrative coherence: the way that this figure of thought allows Langland repeatedly to cultivate an ambiguity about whether his prosopopoiae/personifications are lay or ordained. This telling ambiguity reflects the poet’s disengaged attitude to the institution of the church and even the priesthood.