This chapter deals with the Algerian language regime and its formation/operation during the history of contemporary Algeria, making the Amazigh language activism the common thread through which this language regime has been shaped. The objective is to present a particular postcolonial language regime, which reflects an entire political system. Indeed, it approaches the situation of languages from a double perspective: the status conferred and the status anticipated/expected. The balance, or not, between the two levels helps to define the type of language regime and its stability. However, in this case study, the fact that the Amazigh language is marginalized and far from meeting the expectations of those who claim it, means that the gap between the two statuses is significant. Thus, taking the Amazigh claims as a guideline for approaching the Algerian language regime seems to be the most efficient way to understand and present this language regime. It is the Amazigh language that has experienced the most intense activism. This seems to have weighed the most in the Algerian language regime, pushing it from the inside to evolve, in particular through the critical junctures of political crises.

The Preface outlines the origins, motivations, history, and stakes of the project that led to the publication of this book, and it discusses the project’s relationship to scholarship in Indigenous Studies and engagement of key works in that field. It explores what an approach informed by Indigenous Studies can bring to the history of the human sciences, and how it might build upon existing scholarship on this topic.

The introduction sets the book’s agenda: to offer a novel account of crusade culture from the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453) drawing on Middle English romances and their contexts in various literary, historical, and legal documents (in English, French, Occitan, German, and Latin). The political culture to which post-1291 crusade romances belonged, I argue, was ambivalent, self-critical, and riddled with anxieties. These anxieties were about issues as fundamental and diverse as God’s endorsement of the crusading enterprise, the conversion of crusaders to Islam, sinfulness and divisions within the Christian community, and the morality of violence. After situating the book’s key claims within debates on Edward Said’s Orientalism and crusade literature, I present its methodology: engaged historicism, attention to how romance writers adapted their sources, and analysis of emotional rhetoric. The book’s contributions to the history of emotions and Middle English studies are discussed, as are the new insights it provides into the historical dimensions of the genre of romance.

In the 21st century, educators’ work is arguably more complex and more needed than ever before. The last six decades have witnessed significant changes involving global economic forces, increased competitive production modes, climate change and its ramifications on human and non-human beings. We have felt the impact in education of a pandemic, which seemed to ‘slow us down’, amid a fast-moving and ever-developing technological landscape which had, and continues to have, significant impacts on people’s ways of life. There has been a merging of finance, trade and communication knowledges; societal instability; and a global resurgence in right-wing politics and social movements which are exercised around assumed threats of immigration, ‘race’ and ethnicity and other forms of diversity.

This introduction offers a theoretical model for reading the relation between the conditions that determine the possibility of literary expression, and those possibilities that literature itself invents. It is in the relation between these two forms of possibility, the introduction argues, that the politics of literary form resides.

The last two decades of critical thinking have seen a quite radical shift in our understanding of this relationship. The introduction traces these shifts, and places the essays collected in this volume (written over that two decade period) in the context of such theoretical and political transformations. The passage of literary thinking in the current century, the introduction argues, requires a new critical understanding of literary possibility, which it is the task of these essays to perform.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, the English-language essay engages with colonialism and postcolonial reality to embody forms of life writing that grapple with the provocative confluences of English education, local context, and migrant desire. While conflicts between colonial legacy, postcolonial liberation, and creative imagination assume urgency with pioneers such as V.S. Naipaul and Chinua Achebe, linguistic limits on ethical and political values emerge as defining concerns for apartheid-riven writers such as Nadine Gordimer and Zoë Wicomb, while the scope and constraints of postcolonial representation energise the essays of Shashi Deshpande and Amit Chaudhuri. The fluid and constantly changeable identity of the postcolonial subject that drives the aspirations of the postcolonial essay finds language in its promiscuous texture and heterogeneous structure, its dalliance with analysis, narrative, and image, and its perpetually wandering and unfinished form.

People who may identify as LGBTQ+ and other sexual, affectional, intersex, and gender-expansive (SAIGE) identities around the world face political oppression and social discrimination, including arrest, violence, and murder. In countries that have made strides toward affirming and including SAIGE rights, discrimination and social exclusion still exist. This chapter discusses colonialism, postcolonial theory, and increased awareness of counseling theory related to SAIGE individuals globally.

This chapter examines complex interplays of utopia/dystopia in the context of European colonization through two works: Alberto Yáñez’s postcolonial zombie narrative, “Burn the Ships,” and Yuri Herrera’s dystopian Signs Preceding the End of the World. These works grapple with biopolitical dialectics between utopia and dystopia, belonging and exclusion, and competing identities and epistemologies of mestizaje hybridity. Using as a starting point codices produced by mestiz@ scribes in the dystopian post-Conquest society of sixteenth-century New Spain, analysis draws from Damián Baca’s Mestiz@ rhetoric to demonstrate how these texts exemplify what he defines as a “powerful Mestiz@ rhetorical strategy” of nepantlism – “a strategy of thinking from a border space.” By self-reflexively engaging this Mestiz@ rhetoric through diegetic elements, these texts subvert hegemonic narratives of assimilation in the context of imperialism and the border.

Disciplines traditionally designated as ‘comparative’ – Comparative Literature, History, etc. – have radically called into question comparison as their apparent methodological foundation, even postulating its ‘obsolescence’. Such tendencies have also been informed and driven by the insight that the label ‘comparative’ is a legacy of the nineteenth century, when the ‘comparative method’ spread from biology and philology to other developing academic disciplines. This awareness of its roots in the peak period of colonialism and imperialism has opened ‘comparison’ itself to postcolonial critiques in these disciplines. ‘Comparison’ is no longer necessarily accepted as a timeless and ‘neutral’ methodological constant, but is rather viewed as a contextual historical phenomenon. By contrast, ‘Comparative Law’ scholars have been more hesitant to challenge that radically the role of comparison and the ‘innocence of method’ (Günter Frankenberg). This chapter explores the role that a lack of disciplinary historical self-awareness plays in this display of intellectual restraint. It interrogates, in particular, the traditional self-portrayal of Comparative Law as a ‘young’ discipline and the narrative of the famous 1900 Paris Congress as a mythical point of origin. The trope of such a ‘new beginning’ in or around 1900 insinuates a critical caesura that eclipses Comparative Law’s intellectual roots in the canon of nineteenth- century comparative disciplines, obscuring how these disciplines related to a colonial/imperialistic historical context. The chapter seeks to establish that the entanglement of our disciplinary history with that of the ‘comparative method’, that the coloniality of comparison itself is indeed an important subject in its own right. It suggests a context-sensitive recovery of the discipline’s institutional and discursive history, theoretically informed by scholarship specifically aimed at resisting ‘the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath’ (Leela Gandhi).