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.

The rise of postcolonial literary studies is closely entwined with the publishing success of the work of Salman Rushdie; the two have fed off each other. Rushdie’s work engages with several key concepts of postcolonialism. He challenges colonial discourses and historiography, castigates the post-independence state authorities in both India and Pakistan, and portrays new forms of hybrid cultural identities and processes of global migration. While Rushdie has projected himself as an Indian writer with inside knowledge of that country, the many palpable errors in his work as well as his strong British affiliations complicate this claim. So does a comparison with some indigenous postcolonial writers who still live in the subcontinent and write in an Indian language.

Intersecting critical dance studies and performance studies, this chapter examines K-pop dance as an emerging popular dance medium. It situates K-pop music video choreography within the genealogy of popular dance scholarship by closely reading select point choreographies of iconic K-pop idols over the past decade, such as BTS, BIGBANG, Seventeen, PSY, EXO, BLACKPINK, and TWICE. Styles of K-pop music video include schoolgirls and schoolboys, beast idols and bad girls, dance-centric, experimental, and hybrid. While these categories are preliminary and overlap with one another, the basic styles of choreography open room for discussion on racial and gender identity, hybridity, authenticity, and tourism in transnational contemporary Korean dance beyond the mediated screen.

A comprehensive examination of material connections and artistic exchange between Etruria and Anatolia has never been the focus of an in-depth and heuristic study. Remarkable connections in Etruscan and Anatolian material culture show a growing body of fascinating evidence for various forms of contact and exchange between these two regions. This book establishes a new framework for discussing such similarities, and it invites new conversations about materiality, connectivity, and exchange among two regions separated (literally) by Greece. It examines recurring threads of a rich and varied Etruscan and Anatolian fabric of material networks surfacing in a wide variety of artistic styles and narratives. The traditional ways of looking at the ancient Mediterranean, within strict disciplinary boundaries, can no longer be useful when it comes to this type of cultural, artistic, and ideological query. The time has come to decolonize the ancient Mediterranean framework regarding how peoples and cultures have long been viewed, examined, and packaged. This volume offers a wide range of remarkable connections between Etruria and Anatolia, opening up new ways for examining the ancient Mediterranean.

This chapter sheds light on the uses of modern alchemical discourse by three artists and writers who were affiliated with surrealism: British-born artist Leonora Carrington, British artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, and Greek poet and critic Nanos Valaoritis. All three writers experimented with the potentialities of alchemical language, writing novels premised upon esotericism and myth in terms of imagery, plot, and sensibility: The Stone Door (1977) and The Hearing Trumpet (1976) by Carrington; Goose of Hermogenes (1961) and I Saw Water (2014) by Colquhoun; From the Bones Rising (1982) and Xerxes’s Treasure (1984) by Valaoritis. Influenced by several strands of the alchemical discourse, Carrington, Colquhoun, and Valaoritis resorted to ideas corroborating the transgression of the dominant Enlightenment concept of the unified rational subject, and utilized them as subversive tropes in their revision of hegemonic body politics. In this revision, identity constitution is conceptualized as a process that is open-ended, non-teleological, and performative. The chapter charts these corporeal cartographies, shedding light on the three writers’ appropriations of alchemy in their writing practices; it shows that the alchemical genre primarily functioned as a platform for the exploration of performative manifestations of identity and contributed to fecund redefinitions of the novel.

Chapter 5 is based on the conviction that the problems dealt with in the preceding chapters need to be embedded into the larger multilingual ecologies in which they occur. Since language dominance has proven an important predictor of cross-linguistic influence, which, in turn, determines the acquisition of additional languages, including expectable benefits of previous multilingual experience, one needs to follow up on the factors that are responsible for language dominance. Evidently, these factors are related to or the result of various issues of language policy and planning – both explicit and implicit – that shape the language ecology encountered in a particular region, even down to the nuclear family. It makes a difference whether one studies these issues in traditional European monolingual ecologies where other languages are learnt as classic second or foreign languages, in de jure monolingual ecologies with high numbers of immigrant speakers of other languages, in bilingual territories where the two languages enjoy the same status, coexist peacefully, and where the number of balanced bilinguals is high, in bilingual or multilingual areas with minority languages or stigmatized languages, or in highly multilingual ecologies with a common lingua franca.

According to Carpentier, Columbus rounded, rounded off, and rounded up the planet at a very high cost for the Indigenous cultures of nuestra América (our America). Gradually, a new culture emerged from all the possible hybridizations of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Carpentier also stated that, in order for the novel to exist, there had to be a tradition: the first narratives were for domestic consumption, and it was not until the mid-twentieth century that the avalanche began with El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) and Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps). It was in effect the return to Europe of the galleons that once left Palos de Moguer in Spain, but now carrying another, different, culture. Several factors contributed to Carpentier’s awakening in postwar Europe: the dominance of fiction, somewhat exhausted by the weight of tradition and tired avant-garde formulas, was supplemented by a growing interest in the documentary, thanks to advances in photography and printing. Meanwhile, in Latin America a new approach to the novel was generated via storytelling, linking the particular to the universal. The historical novel was transformed and now demonstrated, alongside an only partially explored physical world, the questions that preoccupy all humankind.

This chapter describes and analyzes the contemporary map of Paraguay, based on its most representative cultural experiences, including that of the Taller Manuel Ortiz Guerrero poets, from which tangara poetry emerges; the poetic work of Jorge Canese, spearhead of several experimentations of current literature; the narrative in Guarani language, of which we choose the novel Kalaíto Pombéro by Tadeo Zarratea (1981) as pivot; and the frontier cartography following the narrative of Damián Cabrera. The democratization process of the Paraguayan society, which started in the 1980s, assures suitable conditions for the publication and dissemination of literature and accompanies the emergence of new aesthetics. The tangara poetry, initiated with the book Tangara tangara (1985) by Ramón Silva, expands the range of Guaraní poetry toward radically different forms compared to the traditional forms. Further, Paraguayan Guarani literature becomes more complex with the jopara, which debuts as a literary language with Ramona Quebranto (1989) by Margot Ayala, and with the display of Guarani narrative. Finally, we find hybridizations used by several authors attempting to reshape their literary language, such as interactions with Portuguese, enhancing a literary and cultural area in the Triple Frontier. These changes turn twenty-first-century Paraguayan literature into a map of high indetermination.

This chapter introduces the volume by offering a reflection on the notion of transition within and across Latin American literary production from 1492 to 1800. This period is defined by a series of transitions as, motivated by personal ambitions or brought by force, Europeans and later Africans and Asians crossed oceans to inhabit the already inhabited lands of the Indies. Native societies and the emergent European colonial societies were transformed by these interactions and the processes that underlay them. This introductory essay explores the broad historical context for this period of transition as it was registered on local and global scales. The book is organized around six thematic areas, which in turn are introduced.

This chapter explores the historiographical project developed by the sixteenth-century mestizo chronicler Diego Muñoz Camargo, son of a Spaniard and a Native woman from Tlaxcala in New Spain. His project develops in three iterations and in each version tells the history of his mother’s ethnic group: Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala (1584), Suma y epíloga de toda la Descripción de Tlaxcala (1588-1589) and Historia de Tlaxcala (1592). This essay looks at how Muñoz Camargo’s three-stage project responded to, in varying ways, the 1577 relación geográfica questionnaire that was devised by the imperial powers to learn about and better control the subjugated regions in the New World. Muñoz Camargo sought to insert the non-European history of Tlaxcala in a colonial Spanish narrative framework.

This concluding chapter describes the inevitability of ambiguity among everyone affected by the Reformation. It reviews historiographical trends of research since the 1970s in intellectual and social history. Comparing these trends to the benefits and shortcomings of the “confessionalization thesis,” it argues for reconsideration of the idea of third forces, adapting a concept suggested by the Austrian medievalist and public intellectual Friedrich Heer and the French Renaissance historian Thierry Wanegffelen. It finally explains how the power of third forces describes the specific hybridity of the Reformation.