This chapter revisits Carl Schmitt’s argument about constitutional identity. By excavating Schmitt’s material conception of constitutional law, I chart the path of affective constitutionalism in the interwar period of the twentieth century. To facilitate the task of relating mind to matter, I bring to bear insights from Raymond Williams, the literary theorist, and develop an argument about constitutions as ’structures of feeling’. By making this approach to materiality usable for thinking about the affective life of constitutions, I hope to bring phenomenology – the philosophy of experience – to the study of constitutional law.

The introduction traces the emergence of new forms of the near future to the global financial crisis of 2008 and ensuing events, linked to an urgent awareness of coming and needed change in relation to global environmental crisis. It argues that by merging the Anthropocene with the broader contemporary field, the near future provides a better means of understanding how global warming makes its presence felt in fiction than does a focus on ‘climate fiction’ alone. Two major themes shape contemporary culture’s relationship to the Anthropocene: the prospect of radical change, and of a broad collective. A large number of works, explored through the first half of the book as the ‘domestic near future’, recoil from the prospect of such cooperation and such change. The second half reads a set of fictions which do try to imagine new kinds of collectivity, and radical change, though they frequently struggle to find a generic form adequate to the task. In these cases, the near future acts more like the emergent form that Raymond Williams hypothesised, underlining the link between the emergent near future as narrative genre, and the cultural shift to which such a genre might correspond.

This chapter re-visits Raymond Williams’s imagined journey in ‘Three around Farnham’, from The Country and the City (1973), to explore the meanings of georgic in a period of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation. It suggests that William Cobbett might be read as a writer engaged with the georgic mode and shows how his writings on rural England contain recognisably pastoral and georgic themes, tropes and rhetorical strategies. It examines Cobbett’s attempts to inhabit the rural ideal through his various farming ventures before reading Rural Rides (1830) as a work in the georgic mode, realised through Cobbett’s detailed mapping of the English countryside. This parallels Cottage Economy (1821–1822), an attempt to take georgic away from elite literary culture and down to the level of the cottage. Finally, the chapter demonstrates how Cobbett’s later tours of industrial Britain imagine a union between agricultural and industrial workers as the only possibility for political reform.

In “Pastoral,” Terry Gifford traces the development of pastoral literature from the classical genre established by Theocritus’ Idylls and Virgil’s Eclogues to its broader use as a literary mode by writers like Shakespeare, Pope, and Wordsworth. He also examines modern iterations of the “post-pastoral” by writers like Seamus Heaney and Adrienne Rich. Attentive to its ideological valences, Gifford examines the persistence of the pastoral mode in literary representations of the relationship between nature and culture, even as authors resist pastoral idealization. The chapter concludes with an overview of what Gifford calls the “prefix-pastoral” (e.g., postmodern pastoral, Black pastoral, feminist pastoral, etc.) in order to capture the diversity of contemporary pastoral literature and theory.

Beginning with Claude McKay’s “The Harlem Dancer”—in which the national space of Harlem opens up to the Caribbean from which its eponymous dancer has likely emigrated—this chapter reads the mass migration resulting from the structures of imperial capital as the determining social ground of modernist literature. Indeed, modernism registered, to an unprecedented degree, in both formal and thematic terms, an early moment of what we have now come to call globalization. But if modernist form betrays a complicity with globalization, in its persistence representation of the way national literary spaces open themselves up to cultural materials from elsewhere, it also levels a consistent critique of both capitalism and nationalism, a critique that unites its left and right wings. Modernist texts thus tend to separate economic and cultural globalization, critiquing the first, while advocating for the second, even as they demonstrate their deep inter-relationship.

The chapter analyses the integral role that literary writing in English, and especially the realist novel, played in imaginatively shaping, structuring and on occasion obscuring processes of nineteenth-century globalization. Taking Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) as case studies, we make two main points: first, that empire formed the constitutive ground of processes of globalization in the period; and, second, that realist fiction provided a means through which these processes could be understood and questioned, from vantage points both metropolitan or northern (Dickens) and peripheral or southern (Schreiner). We proceed in this chapter on the conviction that imperialism was an essential aspect of globalization throughout the long nineteenth century, redistributing wealth and restructuring the global economy in favour of imperial power. Globalization and empire were therefore folded into one another, taking on different features at their geographic and economic cores and peripheral edges. Taking illustrative examples from Dickens in the heart of the Empire and Schreiner at a zone of peripheral extraction, the chapter captures two contrasting yet complementary literary responses to this system.

In the vast and growing scholarship on today’s service sector, the performing arts play a starring role. But the usefulness of performance for explaining how service fits into a capitalist economy is nothing new. Karl Marx, in his critique of political economy, used theater as proof that services could be subsumed to capital. The fact that service work today is increasingly organized along capitalist lines is not evidence that society has entered a kind of post-capitalism. As Marx himself recognized, service under capitalism has always been potentially subject to the law of value. Yet the clarity of Marx’s argument about the economic relation of services like theater to capital has been obscured by the tendency of Marxist cultural theory to either focus on theater’s role in struggles against capital or misgauge theater’s economic proximity to capital. Theater, thus, has become a missed opportunity in Marxist cultural theory for studying a deindustrial society filled with service jobs. Clarifying theater’s economic relation to capital can illuminate the limits capital faces as the jobs its workers do increasingly resemble performance.

In the Introduction I set out the argument of the book by drawing on Aristotle’s Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics as well as on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, to establish the central concepts by which I define the subject of postcolonial tragedy. Key operative concepts that I will incrementally expand upon in the course of the book are introduced in this chapter. These include: tragedy itself, postcolonialism, colonial interpellation, suffering, systematic delirium, postcolonial edginess and precarity, giving an account of oneself, the Akan concept of musuo, causal plausibility, suffering, unruly affective economies, and ethical choice. I also lay out very briefly what I will be doing subsequently in the individual chapters. Thus, I provide minimal synopses of chapters on Shakespeare’s Othello, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and The Road, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy.

Examining the Pareto Circle of thinkers who gathered at Harvard as many disciplines were beginning to articulate themselves and their methods, we look at the interdisciplinary birth of business studies and at the case study method. We argue that this history should be remembered, taught, and utliized in new interdisciplinary pursuits by management education and management studies more generally.