Taking Kerry Reed-Gilbert’s anthology The Strength of Us as Women: Black Women Speak (2000) as touchstone, the chapter undertakes a conversation between two Aboriginal women poets from Narungga and Wiradjuri standpoints about the transformative power of Indigenous poetry and its significant contribution to literature in the world. Offering an alternative to the essay, the authors discuss embodied engagements with the colonial archive and the theme of relationality that informs so much of Aboriginal writing. The chapter considers the potential of poetry to be both an affective tool and literary intervention. It outlines the methods of Gathering and Archival-Poetic praxis as ways to explore the counter-narrative potential of poetry. In considering the role of memory work and memory-making, the authors also discuss blood memory and body memory.

Our Introduction traces the biography of John Cleland, the notorious and hitherto elusive eighteenth-century author, as we now see it through the letters and documents published in this volume. We follow his early career in Bombay, climbing the ranks of the East India Company, his prison writing of and subsequent re-arrest for Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, his volatile relationship with his mother, his disappointment in writing for the stage, his patronage by the Delaval family, and – new to Cleland scholarship – his intriguing friendship with Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and the French spy Thomas Pichon, which reveals new attributions to Cleland and his attempted assimilation amongst a literary Francophone community as ‘Jean de Cleland’.

The history of queer and trans Puerto Rican and Diasporican literature is complex. Its relationship to American literature is fraught with issues of colonialism and linguistic exclusion. Careful analysis of a wide-ranging corpus from the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1882), José de Diego Padró (1924), and Pedro Caballero (1931), reveals a longstanding interest in queer and trans experience in works written in Spanish in Puerto Rico and New York. The massive social transformations of the 1960s and 1970s led to the explosion of critical voices such as those of Luis Rafael Sánchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, and Luz María Umpierre. Their pioneering texts, and the complex writing of Nuyorican authors in English, opened the way for late 1990s and early 2000s authors such as Ángel Lozada and Mayra Santos-Febres, for the eventual creation of collectives such as Homoerótica in 2009, and for the widespread acclaim of writers such as Luis Negrón, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Justin Torres, and Raquel Salas Rivera. “Queerness,” as such, and its Spanish-language variant “cuir,” have been spaces of possibility for Boricua expression for more than one hundred forty years.

The introduction provides an overview of current theoretical concepts in animal and environmental studies for examining historical equine-human relations and previews the book chapters. The author argues that the embodied experiences of historical horses created real-world entanglements with the political and social structures that aimed to define or control them. This animal imprint, made visible in governance structures, was one way that animals participated in early modern social relations and imperial ecologies, and also gave rise to numerous possibilities for feral or counter-intentional responses within an expanding early modern empire.

Social scientists recently claimed Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) is a racist text; that Darwin’s racism blinded him, impacting his science. Biologists and philosophers countered that Darwin’s work should be championed because it undercut slavery-justifying polygenism (independent origins for human races). Others extol Darwin for his emotional condemnation of slavery when he first encountered it on the Beagle voyage. This essay systematically explores Darwin’s views on human race expressed in Descent and then digs through a half-century of Darwin’s correspondence with prominent scientists to answer the question: what were Darwin’s views not just on the human torture involved in the enslavement process but on human race more broadly?

Amid imperial expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white settlers were a tiny minority in most newer colonies, and in some cases, a non-white middle class arose that was educated in the colonizer's language and political system. This produced three main outcomes. (1) White settlers became a sizable minority in certain parts of Africa, which yielded electoral representation. Settler-minority regimes strongly opposed political rights for non-whites. (2) Settlers reversed their support for electoral institutions when their dominance was threatened. In the British West Indies in the mid-nineteenth century, white planters responded to the prospect of political control by Black politicians by disbanding their elected legislatures and accepting direct British Crown rule. (3) In some colonies with few settlers, a non-white middle class educated in the colonizer's language emerged. These elites were especially strong in the major port cities in South Asia and West Africa, and in colonies with emancipated slaves. Non-white elites in these areas gained representation by the 1920s, although with limited autonomy and a narrow franchise.

This chapter develops a theoretical framework centered on three actors: metropolitan officials, white settlers, and non-Europeans. Colonists could pressure the colonial state through lobbying/agitation, nonparticipation, and revolt; and metropolitan officials could respond by offering electoral concessions. What mattered? (1) Metropoles with pluralistic institutions should be more responsive to demands for electoral representation. (2) Sizable white settlements should trigger early electoral institutions (prodemocratic effect), but resistance by smaller settler minorities to franchise expansion could undermine the democratic foundations created by early elections (antidemocratic effect). (3) Where local elites were weak, non-Europeans should not gain early elections. Instead, they would move rapidly to mass-franchise elections with high autonomy after World War II, when the threat of revolt spiked. In cases with a large non-white middle class, we expect early elections with small franchises and low autonomy, which should broaden peacefully over time. Finally, cases with a national monarch should correspond with high autonomy but without meaningful electoral bodies.

Colonial electoral institutions influenced postindependence democracy levels. (1) Lengthy democratic exposure under colonialism usually produced stable postcolonial democracies. Often, a non-white middle class pushed for and participated in elections for multiple decades prior to independence. Early colonial elections involved a tiny segment of the population, but electoral reforms deepened over time and yielded institutionalized parties. After independence, institutionalized parties and democratically socialized elites acted as a buffer against military coups and executive power grabs. Some settler colonies followed this path as well. (2) Many colonies inherited democratic-looking institutions at independence, but these institutions reflected relatively shallow, post-WWII concessions. Few colonies with short colonial pluralism were democratic within a decade of independence, although some experienced post-Cold War democratization episodes. (3) Other colonies gained no meaningful electoral experience. Regimes established by successful anticolonial rebels and monarchies monopolized military power and constructed durable authoritarian regimes after independence.

This chapter summarizes the main findings thematically, including the theory (actors, goals, and strategic options), the pluralism of metropolitan institutions, the dual effects of white settlers, pressure from non-Europeans, and postcolonial persistence. We also develop broader implications for numerous segments of the democratization literature, including top-down democratic transitions, social classes and democratization, democratic sequencing, dominant-party democracies, non-Western institutions and democracy, and international democracy promotion.

Prospects for successful mass revolts increased dramatically after 1945, but the pace of reform and approaches to decolonization varied. Some colonizers moved to mass-franchise elections and high autonomy, ending with formal independence – whereas others sought to cling to power. This yielded three main outcomes. (1) Franchise size and legislative autonomy expanded rapidly in most colonies ruled by democratic powers. These processes tended to occur earlier when left-wing governments were in power, who were less tied to the colonial project. (2) White settler elites and the governing class in authoritarian metropoles opposed empowerment for non-whites, who they perceived as an existential threat to their social status and economic rents. This prompted anticolonial revolts by disenfranchised Africans and Arabs. (3) Colonial officials sometimes granted autonomy to nonelectoral institutions if doing so would avoid revolt and be acceptable to metropolitan opinion. This desire led to a distinct type of authoritarian decolonization, prevalent among British colonies, in which the colonizer handed off power to a national monarch.

Why are some countries more democratic than others? For most non-European countries, elections began under Western colonial rule. However, existing research largely overlooks these democratic origins. This book analyzes a global sample of colonies across four centuries to explain the emergence of colonial electoral institutions and their lasting impact. The degree of democracy in the metropole, the size of the white settler population, and pressure from non-Europeans shaped the timing and form of colonial elections. White settlers and non-white middle classes educated in the colonizer’s language usually gained early elections, but settler minorities resisted subsequent franchise expansion. Authoritarian metropoles blocked elections entirely. Countries with lengthy exposure to competitive colonial institutions tended to consolidate democracies after independence. By contrast, countries with shorter electoral episodes usually shed democratic institutions, and countries that were denied colonial elections consolidated stable dictatorships. Regime trajectories shaped by colonial rule persist to the present day.

Before the nineteenth century, most European colonies were located in the New World. British colonies experienced more electoral competition because of parliamentary institutions at home. British-settled colonies in North America, the West Indies, and Oceania routinely gained fully elected assemblies shortly after settlement. However, the early British empire was far from democratic: voting rights were confined to white property-owning men, London occasionally pushed back on settlers’ policymaking autonomy (prompting the American Revolution), and colonies with Catholic or convict populations experienced long delays before gaining electoral representation. Prior to the French Revolution, colonists in the French, Spanish, and Portuguese empires lacked electoral representation beyond the municipal level. Afterward, political transformations in authoritarian metropoles triggered reforms to colonial institutions. France fluctuated between democratic and authoritarian institutions after the French Revolution, and colonial institutions closely tracked metropolitan patterns. Spain and Portugal engaged in abortive electoral reforms in their colonies, which preceded the dissolution of their American empires.

In the Afro-Atlantic city of Lagos, Africans birthed sexualities in slavery and colonialism. Sex undergirded the politics of emancipation, imperial subjecthood, urbanization, and social differentiation. Africans navigated sexual politics as an afterlife of slavery, living a spectrum of gendered unfreedoms ranging from the persistence of slavery to reinventions of Atlantic slavery’s hierarchies under the guise of abolition. Where old slaving and neo-imperial African and European elites exploited African bodies for labour, sex, and power, discourses about the potency and danger of sexed bodies, including slaves, redeemed and adopted children, ‘wives’, soldiers, ‘prostitutes’, ‘delinquent youth’, domesticated and politically marginalized women, and ‘sexually perverse’ subjects, constituted the polysemic production of sexualities. Sexual politics drove British imperial compromises over abolition as well as colonialist conceptions of male bodies capable of wage labour, sports, and political leadership, as distinct from female bodies best suited for social and biological reproduction. Local resistance entailed age- and gender-distinctive conceptions of bodily autonomy to repudiate elite theft of bodily potency and escape the surveillance state. In Lagos the state policed Black youth mobility, criminalized ‘carnal knowledge against the order of nature’, and used military violence to restrain nonconformist sexuality because it asserted power through sex governance.

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.

The history of the print media”s engagement with sexuality is a topic of enormous complexity. Depictions of sexuality in the periodical press are shaped by cultural attitudes and beliefs, representational and reporting practices, political economies, and audiences across time and space. The print media have been richly social since their inception, and all but the most rigorously controlled media systems have covered topics of a sexual nature. Sexuality has been represented as an object of social regulation, a topic of prurient interest, a problem to be solved, regulated, or eradicated, a form of commerce, and even a patriotic or religious duty. The press has played a major role in the modern project of demarcating normal sex and sexual subjects from deviant practices and identities. It has fomented moral panics around sexuality and helped liberalize sexual norms, sometimes simultaneously. The commercial, advertising-driven press developed in tandem with the sexual content it contained, and has long been a vehicle for racialized narratives of rape, imperiled femininity, and vice, adultery, and divorce. Through advertisements, classifieds, and specialized content in “obscene” journals, print media have, in some contexts, advertised sexual services and even brought people together for various types of sex.

Chapter 3 takes a more biographical approach, seeing an example of moral human perfection in the, little known, but dedicated, life and work of Dr Henry Holland, a medical missionary in North India, compared favourably with the well-known, but flawed, medical missionary work of his more famous exact contemporary Albert Schweitzer. Together with the two earlier chapters, it is suggested that human perfection – understood in the contextual sense of it being difficult to see how something similar could at the time have been done better – is dynamic rather than absolute, just as John Wesley, Calvin, Aquinas and Gregory claimed, is highly focused and requires very considerable effort and hard work -- striving to get something as near to perfect as humanly possible. It concludes with a discussion of the recent work of the late Catholic medical anthropologist Paul Farmer.