Tracy’s theology has often been well received in African contexts for its hermeneutical openness, but difficult distances remain between Tracy’s post-modern framing of theology and post-colonial imperatives. Tinyiko Sam Maluleke criticises universalising gestures in historic Christian theology, repeated in recent ‘public theology’, that efface the kinds of differences in power that follow from colonial domination. Few who abide in entrenched traditions of subjugation, Afro-pessimism, and Western supremacism will be willing, ready, or able to re-evaluate sufficiently their readings of ‘the classics’– despite Tracy’s hopes for such hermeneutical events. And yet, Tracy’s subsequent work: (1) parses classics as ‘frag-events … that shatter, negate, and fragment all totality systems … including Christendom’; and (2) emphasises the dialectical and apophatic seriousness of his commitment to thinking analogically. Perhaps Tracy could be received outside the limiting frame of Western post-modernity, in support of decolonising exchanges between subjugated African theological experience, on the one hand, and historically privileged perceptions stained by colonialism, on the other.

From its earliest Viking origins, Dublin was part of a networked Atlantic geography of exchange. Throughout its history, Dublin’s place in world literature has been influenced by the shifting shapes of those networks over time.Eighteenth-century, literary Dublin, for instance, was determined by the gravitational field of London, while by the middle of the nineteenth century, Dublin would have become the point of origin for a transnational diaspora– an origin akin to a wound from which the blood is being drained: insular, entrophic, and suffering (in James Joyce’s phrase fromDubliners) from paralysis. Joyce is the pivotal figure here, insofar as he was to see how the city’s insular, embedded sense of place could co-exist with a generative sense of incompleteness, an awareness of the phantom limb of the global network of which the city was a part, capable of being sutured by imagination.That suturing effect would also, paradoxically, reposition what had become a peripheral city to the centre of modernist writing, notably in Joyce’s Ulysses. Finally, with Dublin today one of the most globalised cities in the world, literary form is being once more reconfigured as networks shift and are again radically decentred.

This chapter traces the socio-economic dimensions of rights development in the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). The author argues that, in the context of this revolution, which began with a revolt against slavery but became an anti-colonial struggle for independence, the conceptual separation of civil and political rights, on the one hand, and socio-economic rights, on the other, makes little sense. The story of the birth of the world’s first black republic reveals the co-dependency of socio-economic rights and citizenship rights in a struggle for liberation and dignity. The intertwined nature of citizenship and socio-economic justice is examined across several documents, including the 1801 Constitution of Saint-Domingue and the 1805 Imperial Constitution of Haiti, as well as other texts written by the revolutionaries themselves. The chapter suggests that, rather than date the advent of socio-economic rights to the twentieth century, historians should look for the socio-economic stakes of prior struggles over civil and political rights and the ways in which certain protagonists in those struggles tried to suppress them.

This chapter examines how the title of founder of the law of nations was bestowed upon Grotius and how the liberal internationalist interpretation of the existence of a Grotian tradition in international law came into being. It also reviews the extent to which both historical constructs have been challenged by new historical research and contemporary re-interpretations of Grotius’ works and figure. The first part accompanies the reception of Grotius by international lawyers from the discovery of his De Jure Praedae in 1864 to the establishment of the Grotius Society during WWI. The second part examines the revivals of Grotius among international lawyers in the aftermaths of both world wars and considers a number of Grotius-related historiographical developments during the Cold War period. The third part examines how, in recent decades, on the one hand Grotius has become further institutionalised as a global symbol of international law while on the other hand his reputation has suffered from him being labelled a handmaiden of European colonialism and exploitation. The conclusion reflects on the lasting fame of the ‘miracle of Holland’ among international lawyers and suggests that the history of international law as a research field should take a break from Hugo Grotius.

The 1999 publication of Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (translation, 2004) accorded Ireland and Irish writers an unusually high profile among world literature studies. In chapter 10 of that volume, entitled “The Irish Paradigm,” Casanova foregrounded the achievement of the Irish Literary Revival as what she termed “a compact history of the revolt against the literary order.” This chapter examines the value and limitations of Casanova’s reading as part of a broader examination of the pertinence of terms such as “national,” “international” and “transnational” with respect to Irish writing. It focuses on three case studies: firstly, the historical relationship between Irish fiction and the subject of empire, as exemplified by the work of nineteenth-century novelist Maria Edgeworth. Secondly, it examines the work of W.B. Yeats, most famous writer of the Irish Revival, and his critical status as poet of decolonization and exemplar of transnational poetics. Finally, the transnational character of contemporary Irish fiction is discussed, including recent writings by writers Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, Mike McCormack and Melatu Uche Okorie.

Accelerated developments in the publishing industry have caused a shift in the conception and reception of South Asian Anglophone fiction. This fiction is branching into other sub-genres to question the historical, political and ecological realities of post-colonies. Decoding the complexities of the Anthropocene epoch, South Asian authors Amitav Ghosh and Osama Siddique fuse fictional and non-fictional modes of narration in their novels to explore the relationship between humanity and climate change. This chapter examines Siddique’s Snuffing Out the Moon (2017) and Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019) as post-colonial ecological crime fiction that investigates the intensification of climate breakdown. The chosen texts incorporate crime fiction elements of historical retelling, partial detection and quests for justice to trace the causality of anthropocentric climate change and its material ramifications (climatic cataclysms, habitat loss, mass migrations, species extermination) for human and animal life, thereby highlighting the significance of climate as a determinant of planetary survival.

If political sociology centers on relations between the state and civil society, then it is fair to say that those relations are now marked increasingly by state repression and racial and ethnic violence. The turn of the twenty-first century witnessed the rapid rise of antiglobalization protests around the world followed by even larger antiwar demonstrations as the United States prepared to invade Iraq. Yet these movements faced intense crackdowns from increasingly militarized police and state security forces. Similarly, the 2010s saw deadly clashes between police forces and authoritarian regimes on the one hand, and popular movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter on the other. Ethnic nationalism is now in the ascendant and with it has come a permissive attitude toward official and unofficial violence.

The aesthetic power of Persian images and figures - the nightingale, the Simurgh, the chessboard of life - found in the works of Omar Khayyam and the poet-astronomer, Farid al-Din ’Attar, clearly delighted Borges and served to rhetorically embellish his own metaphysical explorations. Engaging with the ’Rubaiyat’ of Omar Khayyam, he perceived a model of translation as an act of mysterious, generative non-linear literary collaboration. ’Attar is the author of the exemplary literary construction of the theme of the seeker being sought. In fictions such as ’El Zahir’ and essays such as ’The Simurgh and the Eagle’, Borges enlists Persian referents to confront and unsettle the centre-periphery dynamics he, and subsequent post-colonial thinking, perceived at play among world literatures.

Borges and Nobel Prize-winner J Coetzee coincide on many points. Both have written literary criticism consistently throughout their careers, and there are similarities in their views on specific writers (e.g. Kafka), philosophers, and works. The two resemble each other in their use of language, their education, family background, and post-colonial agendas. Borges is present at numerous levels in Coetzee’s novels, for example in ’Foe’ (Borges had himself written on ’Robinson Crusoe’), and Borgesian self-masking of the author pervades novels from ’Elizabeth Costello’ (2003) on.

The epilogue re-evaluates two related problems central in the monograph: the relationships between heritage and violence and between heritage and religion. It does so, first, by focusing on case studies that reveal the relation between sites, heritage dynamics, and the taboos and silences concerning the massacres of 1965 in Indonesia. Secondly, it reassesses the question of Indonesian Islam and its implicit absence in heritage politics, both at a global level and in the Indonesian context. In light of violent heritage conflicts concerning religious-cum-heritage sites in colonial and contemporary India, it may seem remarkable that, in predominantly Islamic Indonesia, a Buddhist and a Hindu shrine remain the most important national monuments. However, the mobile approach to heritage has made clear how and why Borobudur and Prambanan as national monuments are not necessarily what they look like from canonical art-historical perspectives or tourist guides. They were and are being (re-)made in exchanges of knowledge, and exchanges of partial ownership at different levels (religious, economic, scholarly, spiritual, universalising).

Between 18 November and 25 December 1962, eleven members of the Australian Army’s 16 Light Aircraft Squadron were deployed to West New Guinea (now the Indonesia province of Papua) to assist with efforts to control an outbreak of cholera. This was essentially a humanitarian mission, but it became part of a wider UN peacekeeping mission, namely the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (Untea) in West New Guinea, which operated from October 1962 to April 1963. The mission, which enjoyed the support of both Indonesia and the Netherlands, was held up as one of the success stories of the United Nations’ first 20 years of peacekeeping operations, satisfying its mandate on schedule and under budget. In a technical sense this was true, but Untea faced constant pressure from Indonesia and, in the end, the United Nations failed to uphold the right of the West New Guinea people to self-determination.