K-pop formations are believed to have drawn inspiration from Seo Taiji and Boys, who arrived in the early 1990s and became a cultural phenomenon before disbanding in 1996. They offered a unique blend of melodic tunes, heavy beats, short raps, and synchronized dance sequences that drew on hip hop, rock, and disco. They transformed Korean music and fashion and had a profound effect on young Koreans’ sense of identity and national pride. However, despite the band’s pioneering role, it did not provide a blueprint for the business model of K-pop today. Partly in response to the decline in record sales, today’s reliance on concert tours, marketing media, and talent shows developed later. But the formulas themselves are not entirely new to Korean pop music. This chapter explores talent shows organized in the 1930s and 1940s. Although the conditions of pop music were different then, the early prevalence of the shows demonstrates that public auditions, competition, and audience participation took root early on. Focusing on the symptomatic ethos, signs, and practices of neoliberalism, rather than retrofitting the neoliberal era to the 1930s, the author contends that the music industry recognized by then that neoliberal attributes can be a powerful marketing ploy.

The anti-colonial struggle staged in Zimbabwe against repressive British colonial rule depicted a liberation for equality, freedom and democracy. If Zimbabwe regularly held elections to choose alternative leaders from different political parties in different elections, allowing winners of a free and fair election to assume office; and in turn the winners of one election did not prevent the same competitive uncertainty from prevailing in the next election, the country would be democratic. However, there is no equivalence between elections and democracy. The minimalist conception of democracy is the indispensable institutional characteristic of electoral competition and its uncertainty. The maximalist notion requires extra-electoral imperatives for democracy to fully flourish, incorporating a wide range of types of institutions, processes and conditions to be present for a nation to be called a full democracy. Widespread election violence in 1980 dented Zimbabwe’s opportunity to develop ideal democratic cultures that embrace electoral democracy, government accountability and the rule of law. Post-war political, dissident and election violence proved to be Zimbabwe’s greatest political problem early on. Election and political violence, mhirizhonga or udlakela, largely amongst the Ndebele and Shona was a major concern characterised by intimidation, harassment, vandalism and murders.

The chapter recovers and investigates a substantial body of poems from undivided India composed during 1914–1918 and how such a corpus challenges conventional Anglo-centric understandings of the term 'First World War poetry'. Showcasing the remarkable range and richness of war poetry written in Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, and English, the chapter examines some of their historical and formal complexities, including their oral and aural dimensions; in the absence of testimonies, such poetry fills in the gaps left by history. Starting with civilian verse and songs – elite and subaltern, written and spoken, pro-war and anti-war, direct, oblique or diffuse - I propose the idea of a war 'poetics' rather than ‘poetry’ from combatant men and village women who were often non-literate but highly literary. I conclude with readings of the 'war poems' of Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammed Iqbal and Kazi Nazrul Islam, the national poets of the future India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh respectively.

This chapter recovers the performances of Saint Domingue’s refugees who fled the slave uprisings and acted out their relationship to Haiti on professional American stages. The Haitian Revolution’s refugees also appeared as stage characters in original plays such as John Murdock’s 1795 The Triumphs of Love, which reimagined refugees as refined but unfortunate figures, integrating them into American culture by differentiating them from comic but rebellious slaves.

Quayson’s chapter compares the Dublin of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1904 with the real-life multilingual city of Accra, Ghana. In these twentieth- and twenty-first-century contexts, Quayson finds different forms of epic dreaming and material work. From among these celebrations of the kinetic aspects of urban life, he focuses on advertising billboards and personal slogans and pronouncements, arguing that these slogans and Joyce’s interior linguistic landscape in Ulysses exemplify what Deleuze and Guattari have described as the deterritorialization of language. Quayson draws on these theorists to offer a new way of understanding a central problem of language in Joyce’s writing – the self-interlocution and the relations between external stimuli and internal activities of the mind – and the nature of the Accra streetscape, in which vehicle slogans and inscriptions turn oral discourse into a written text, transforming stigmatized terms of African indigenous languages into co-creative dimensions of English discourse.

This chapter is basically a review of a collection of poems mirroring the Yoruba cultural ethos, drawn from Etches on Fresh Waters, Scoundrels of Deferral, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, and Counting the Tiger’s Teeth. Believing the core of a nation to be its people, the poetry collections seek to present a narration of the nation through poems about the cultural practices, values, and beliefs of the people. Clearly, the chapter depicts poetry as a creative mode of expression, performing a “dialectic function of narrating a group’s culture,” and as a means of “documenting” and “teaching” culture. The chapter launches into the cultural significance of poetry and how poetry reflects the past and present cultural realities of the Yoruba people especially. The cultural ethos include salutations to the revered, celebration of ethnic identity, sermons on moderation, unrestrained freedom, and hospitality, amongst others, while some were used to show women’s sociocultural position.

The chapter begins with the concept of satire for the reader’s understanding of its broad and deep meaning and its significance. It proceeds to show the methodology of satire, which is to “highlight” and “ridicule” an act of folly to effect change in an individual, group, or society behind the act. It does this using figurative tools such as humor, hyperbole, irony, or sarcasm. In context, the chapter examines the use of satire and satirical expressions in works to mirror the African society. Importantly, the chapter notes that for satire to be birthed, there must be a set societal standard by which the subject’s action is measured against that which has been breached. While “morality is often the end goal of tales, parables, proverbs, etc., for satire, the concern goes above morality to include public interest.” The chapter finds satire in “songs of abuses,” which is very prominent among the Yoruba. These songs are often sung or performed when people are deemed to have fallen short of societal set standards. Or when criminals such as murderers, thieves, witches, and other extreme violators of social conduct are caught and especially exposed.

Chapter 5 shifts to the island colony of Singapore, where Australia’s Eighth AMF Division defended the island alongside British and local forces and volunteers in the weeks before its capitulation, suffering greatly as Japanese captives. The chapter describes the dispersal of camps at the fall of Singapore, following the fate of Australian and other Allied soldiers across an emergent camp geography. Its main aim is envisioning the entirety of the island as converted to an encampment through the distribution of Allied camps, including the dispersal of work camps in requisitioned domestic and institutional facilities, exploring how wartime defense and capitulation provided structures for contemporary citizenship.

Chapter 6 discusses the two most notorious institutions in wartime Singapore, the Changi and Outram Road prisons, with key focus on civilian internment at Changi. It describes the colonial origins of penal institutions and the erection of Changi Prison as the first modern (reinforced-concrete) penal complex. The prison’s inversion to intern colonial residents, as an act of forced removal and dispossession of once-privileged colonial civilians, is discussed in terms of “subalternization,” a recurring theme in subsequent chapters. The chapter focuses specifically on the experiences of incarcerated colonial women, children and elders, as different to those of imprisoned service personnel. It concludes with their relocation to Sime Road Camp.

Beachcombers lived in the Pacific Islands and were the vagrants of the South Seas. Historically, they were most prominent in the early nineteenth century and belonged to the medial phase between the Pacific Islanders’ first contact with Europeans and the formal colonisation that followed. By the 1880s and 1890s they had been thoroughly displaced by white missionaries and merchants; however, despite this, the beachcomber became an increasingly prominent figure in British culture during this period. This chapter examines the importance of the beachcomber in the imperial imagination. It explores how the beachcomber was presented in popular novels and the periodical press as both an imperial pathfinder and as a degraded ‘white savage’ destined for extinction; and how these alternative representations were key to the public’s understanding of the Pacific Islands. This analysis provides the context for a close reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide (1894), a novella in which the beachcomber serves as an essential figure in Stevenson’s critique of empire.

Trish Salah contextualizes the broad post-2010 emergence of transgender fiction in a longer history of earlier trans and queer fiction and theory while arguing that “trans genre writing” has found recent prominence as a new minor literature. Particular challenges have led trans writers to innovate at the levels of language and aesthetics, perspective (collective, but not homogeneous), and genre, among others. Moreover, these works thematize and challenge norms and imperatives of empire, race, history, visibility, and geography.

Mary Pat Brady’s chapter poses an alternative approach to hemispheric fiction by reading not according the scales of concentric geometries of space (local, regional, national, transnational), but instead reconceptualizing what she terms “pluriversal novels of the 21st century.” She argues for attending to the complexly mixed temporalities, perspectives, and languages of novels that reject the dualism of monoworlds (center/periphery) for the unpredictability of stories anchored in multiple space-times. While this is not an exclusively 21st-century phenomenon, she shows that pluriveral fiction has flourished recently, as works by Linda Hogan, Jennine Capó Crucet, Julia Alvarez, Gabby Rivera, Karen Tei Yamashita, Ana-Maurine Lara, and Evelina Zuni Lucero demonstrate.

A self-proclaimed “minor female Wordsworth,” Bishop is honest yet modest about nature’s centrality that endures through her writing. Her eye for natural detail is exhibited early in signature poems such as “The Fish,” then her nature writing develops sublime power in A Cold Spring with “At the Fishhouses” and “Cape Breton.” These Canadian maritime poems blend humanity with nature and machinery in unusual synthetic harmony mid-century. Bishop’s memoir “In the Village” demonstrates how, after family tragedy, nature works as a recuperative catalyst in her evolving artistry. This short story is the centerpiece of her oeuvre, and it displays her modus operandi with its unusual blend of genres used to begin the mostly poetic volume Questions of Travel; this title poem demonstrates the natural fluidity of waterfalls in rhythmically flowing language. Nature here, and in later prosaic breakthroughs such as “The Moose,” is integral to Bishop’s innovative use of genres and poetic forms.