This chapter explores the ways that postcolonial governments of India and Pakistan attempted to homogenize governance arrangements within their territories; this project was not entirely successful, but did lead to substantial revision of colonial categories. It begins with a discussion of the foreclosed possibility of Home Rule arrangements in which distinctions in governance practice might have persisted in practice after independence in a united India; the politics of Partition instead led to the formation of two sovereign states, but with significant variation in the power and authority of the state in each. It explores the particular politics in India and Pakistan that limited each country’s ability to undertake fundamental reform of the state and the homogenization of governance procedures, including differing perspectives among political leaders on how best to deliver security and development, and the persistence of bureaucratic structures. It also outlines the roots of a more even political geography in Bangladesh, an exception to the patchwork states of India and Pakistan. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the colonial forms of governance translates into a postcolonial typology of governance arrangements, with distinctions in state capacity and state-society relations.

This chapter introduces the book. It begins with an examination of the many different types of violence in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, from insurgencies and terrorist attacks to violence within society; extant approaches to explaining violence and conflict cannot explain such variety within national borders. It introduces the patchwork states framework: the notion that the spatial politics of competition and conflict can be traced back to state-building under colonial rule, and postcolonial revisions to that rule. It then lays out the ways in which colonial administrators established different forms of governance arrangements across the Indian subcontinent as a response to greed, fear, and frugality. Postcolonial governments attempted to revise these arrangements, but with limited success, yielding differences in state capacity and state–society relations within India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The chapter then introduces the ways in which differences in governance leads to legible patterns of political violence at the local level – including the incidence of sovereignty-contesting and sovereignty-neutral violence –– as well as the broader politics of conflict and competition, impacting electoral and development outcomes. The chapter concludes by discussing some of the implications of the argument and outlining subsequent chapters.

This chapter examines repatriation and indigenous meanings, values, and uses of their material cultural heritage. What is the legacy of conquest that postcolonial scholarship and advocacy are challenging, and how are they doing so? How and why are the perspectives, means, challenges, and accomplishments regarding indigenous populations reclaiming ownership of cultural heritage different around the world?

In Chapter 7, I analyse cases in which decision-makers have to determine whether a person can seek refuge in an internally displaced persons’ (IDP) camp. This occurs in what is known as an ‘internal protection alternative’ inquiry. In some cases, asylum seekers have pleaded that if they returned to their homeland and relocated, they would have no option but to live in an IDP camp. Initially, in such cases decision-makers set a broad scope for adequate refuge and approached decisions with an ethic of international cooperation. But subsequently, there has been a transition in which decision-makers produce rudimentary notions of refuge. They give it a narrow scope – limiting it to bare survival rights – and there is a shift from understanding that refuge involves a nation-state bestowing protection to positioning refuge as something an individual can forge themselves. The understanding that refuge is an act of international solidarity has dissipated from the jurisprudence. Protection from life in an IDP camp will only be granted if the asylum seeker can establish that they are exceptionally vulnerable. A feminist analysis highlights that decision-makers’ notional approaches to the interactions between gender and vulnerability have resulted in problematic outcomes for both male and female refugees.

In Chapter 6, I examine protection from refuge claims made by Palestinian refugees. Some Palestinian refugees leave an UNRWA area of operation (Jordon, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza strip, East Jerusalem or the West Bank) and seek refugee protection elsewhere. In making these journeys, they confront article 1D of the Refugee Convention, which provides that Palestinian refugees are excluded from protection under the Refugee Convention unless their UN protection or assistance has ceased for any reason. When decision-makers reflect on the nature of Palestinian refugeehood and expand their juridical borders, they come close to setting a broad scope of refuge for Palestinian refugees and characterising refuge as a right, duty and act of international solidarity. However, most decision-makers determine these claims in a way that truncates the scope of refuge, positions refuge not as a right but as an act of benevolence and entrenches article 1D as a containment mechanism. This inhibits Palestinian refugees’ ability to find a place of refuge outside the UNRWA region unless their circumstances are deemed exceptional in some way. A feminist analysis of the case law indicates that the approach to exceptionality in article 1D jurisprudence creates additional barriers for female Palestinian refugees.

This chapter considers the “globalization” of magical realism in the 1980s and its relationship to the consolidation of postcolonial literary studies in the same moment. Even as Latin America was being progressively marginalized in favor of taxonomic accounts of magical realism as a signature postcolonial style, Salman Rushdie and other South Asian authors became “pilgrims.” They use textual journeys to Latin America to declare the centrality of that tradition to their own forays into literary magic. Through references to Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and others, Rushdie and Zulfikar Ghose pose Latin America as a funhouse mirror that reflects back a hyperbolically distorted but ultimately referential image of postcolonial political life. Ghose is joined by Anita Desai in his approach to Latin America as a concave mirror, one that allows inverting the implied political meaning of institutional affiliation in “America” by redirecting their attachment southward. Finally, Sunny Singh interrogates the postcolonial critical desire for magical realism to act as a transparent window onto traditions of home, framing it instead as a looking glass – both opposite and identical.

Studies of world literature and the Global Anglophone hinge on imagined locations where readers encounter texts: the university classroom, the state library, the airport kiosk. Yet all of these bookshelves are institutional, shaped by either the market or the state. In the meantime, South Asian authors themselves were constructing another collection, a “countershelf” of Latin American texts, authors, and locations through which they could identify against the Anglophone globe in which they were simultaneously compelled to circulate. Like the concept of a “counterpublic” from which it takes its name, the countershelf uses literature to enact a minoritized discursive space, one irreducible to – though not untouched by – institutional power. The Introduction traces the countershelf’s four key features: the idea of being “contrary” to a dominant, canonical tradition; of having been “curated” through interpersonal relationships with other readers and writers; of being “circulated” through channels both practical and affective; and, finally, of being “contested” between various writers participating in the tradition, rather than a site of pre-established ideological unity.

Chapter 8 foregrounds the ethics and politics of the second person in ‘postcolonial’ writing, addressing the use of ‘you’ in yet two other genres, that of the essay in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988) and that of the short story with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ published in an eponymous collection in 2009. Kincaid and Adichie use two different techniques to have the reader reflect on her own beliefs and prejudices through a rhetoric of contrast. Kincaid targets specific readers (‘you the tourist’) as representative of the white western tourists who fly every day to her native island Antigua to get away from their daily burden. She thus reduces the reference of ‘you’ to a specific membership category she stigmatises in her very powerful interpellation of the self-centred tourists, denouncing the tourist industry her native island Antigua is subjected to. Whilst Kincaid uses direct forceful address, Adichie chooses a You type that brings the reader to align with the character’s perspective in a more indirect yet as forceful way that the pragma-linguistic analysis of the short story will precisely display.

Rights discourse is marked by ambivalence – the enunciation of rights alongside the attendant exclusions and violations of said rights. In the eighteenth century, for instance, the language of rights was used to justify the French and American revolutions even as women and the enslaved were excluded from the category of rights bearers. The human-based conception of rights also excluded the environment. This chapter proposes that extension of rights to both humans and nonhumans is at the core of the environmental humanities (EH). EH discourse of rights attends to the marginalization of communities disproportionately affected by the distribution of ecological risks and nonhuman ecologies threatened by anthropogenic activities such as resource extraction and energy use. Enunciations of rights in EH demonstrate a commitment to not only a select group of humans but to all humans as well as to the rights of nonhumans. However, EH discourse of rights is not without tensions, including the competing claims to rights among humans and between the interests of human and other-than-human worlds. The chapter concludes with an exploration of these tensions in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.

The specific context of urban migration in West Africa provides a fertile field from which to pluralise currents concepts of sense of place. If research on sense of place is to address the global phenomena of mobility and migration, then this requires an immediate implementation of calls to consider roots and routes and fixity and flow in the production of senses of place. This chapter presents two key findings in relation to West African migrants’ sense of place, both in relation to their place of residence and their place of origin. This first is that new migrants with weak people–place bonds have a heightened quality of life in comparison to locals. This runs counter to assumptions that strong place attachment is beneficial for well-being. The second is that migrants invest considerable efforts into maintaining sense of place in locations where they no longer reside.