This notebook contains some of the ideas, ambitions, hopes, anxieties, interrogations, and fears that randomly or expectingly came to punctuate the writing of the previous chapters.

The introduction outlines the geographies of slavery and black freedom in eighteenth-century Colombia, the significance of region and race in Colombian history, and the importance of the mobilities of black people, their labour, and their culture in traversing and connecting New Granada’s Caribbean and Pacific worlds. Fisk argues for the centrality of geography, in particular place and mobilities, for shaping black religious knowledge and practice in a period (1690–1790) rarely studied by historians of African diasporic cultural history. After a historiographical and theoretical examination of how African diasporic religious formation has been studied, Fisk explores the variety of regimes of slavery and sites in which people of African descent resided in colonial Colombia – from cities, haciendas, and mines to maroon communities. She argues that place fundamentally shaped how people of African descent engaged with Catholicism. She conceptualises black Catholic practice in eighteenth-century New Granada as an “interstitial religion,” born of the physical and metaphorical interstices in a colonial society governed through slavery and introduces a methodology of religious geographies for the study of black religious knowledge where there is no written canon.

Joyce’s life spans a period when material conditions, political structures, and intellectual life throughout the world were profoundly shaped by the growth and decline of European empires and the flourishing of various nationalisms, both imperialist and anti-imperialist. When Joyce was born in 1882 the ‘scramble for Africa’ and the era that one influential historian has called the ‘age of empire’ had just begun. When he died in 1941 the world was engulfed in WWII, a conflict that would fundamentally alter the balance of global power, and the age of decolonization was under way. A good deal of influential Joyce scholarship has explored Joyce’s relation to this historical trajectory. Much of it has been informed by postcolonial studies, committed to examining the complex set of issues and questions we can group under the general headings of ‘colonialism’ and ‘nationalism’. Ireland’s double status as both centre and periphery, agent and victim of colonialism is important to any investigation of how Joyce’s works engage with such issues and questions.

Chapter 3 presents the case of Cameroon, a long-standing electoral autocracy in Central Africa. It provides a political history of the country, focused on the foundation, organization, and operations of Cameroon’s many political parties. It also elucidates the nature of Cameroon’s political geography, concluding with a section on the ways in which Cameroon may or may not be considered a “typical” case of electoral authoritarianism.

Over thirty years ago, Benedict Anderson asked students of Southeast Asia: Why did French Indochina eventually splinter into three political units, while the Dutch East Indies emerged as a single national polity? This chapter takes up Anderson's challenge to evaluate the central claim of this book: That variation in the institutions governing colonial-era bureaucratic selection proved influential in either forging or undermining the horizontal camaraderie constitutive of multi-ethnic nations. This chapter shows that where colonial rulers introduced the meritocratic selection of local civil servants – as the French did in Indochina – privileged groups tended to outstrip marginalized groups in the competition for coveted government jobs. Meanwhile, where colonial regimes relied on indigenous elites to select local staff – as the Dutch did in the East Indies – there was little inter-group competition for government jobs, as elites tended to dole out jobs to members of their ethnic in-group, with the consequence of siloing grievances.

Popular discourses on conflicts in the Great Lakes region argue that many of these conflicts have been caused by “erroneous” borders that cut up communities for European interests. This chapter argues that rather than with where these borders were drawn, the problem is what they did and do. In the second half of the nineteenth century in the Lake Kivu region, communities could not be neatly delineated and matched to clearly circumscribed territory, as relations between territory and identity were different. The divergence between how political communities were perceived was not just between “European” and “African” conceptions but also between those of a centralizing state – the Nyiginya kingdom – and those societies in the “frontier” that had other forms of sociopolitical organization.

Starting from a discussion of the tumultuous context at the turn of the twentieth century, the chapter addresses the imperial conflict between Germany and the Congo Free State, who both claimed Lake Kivu and its hinterland as their imperial possession, in what became known as the “Kivu-Bufumbiro conflict.” The chapter traces the different perspectives over how to understand the sociopolitical context and unsettled spatial organization that emerge from the debates between imperial powers in the context of this conflict The chapter concludes with an examination of the early impact of European border making on local populations, and the ways in which they tried to use the colonial border for their own survival.

Two of the most striking developments in the modern history of global Christianity have been the respective strengths of Catholic Christianity in Central and Latin America and of Protestant and Pentecostal Christianity in mostly sub-Saharan Africa. The aim of this chapter is to shed some light on these important stories by focusing on two early modern, imperial case studies, one from the Spanish conquest of New Spain and another from the British colonial project in West Africa, specifically Sierra Leone. Moreover, to what extent does the theoretical model of nuclei (the inner core of religious traditions), nodes (points of connection and exchange), and networks (transnational flows of people, ideas, and artifacts) help us understand better the various processes that produced such significant consequences for the global transmission of Christianity in the early modern and modern world?

Chapter 8 considers the politics and poetics of alterity or otherness. Others confront us with experiences that may be radically unfamiliar, strange, and unsettling. This may be compounded by illness, trauma, and cultural difference. With empathy and imagination, we can gain an understanding of another’s experience, see their perspective, and build a picture of their predicament. The imaginative spaces and places in their stories offer us a way into another’s lifeworld—even when that world is profoundly different from our own. Narrative medicine provides a pedagogy of empathic understanding through literature. While much of this work employs story, lyric poetry offers another mode of articulating illness experience that may be closer to patients’ emotionally charged, confused efforts to make sense of experiences that do not fit cultural models or templates. The work of the poets Paul Celan and Edouard Glissant sheds light on the power of language to bridge disparate worlds and on the ethical stance needed when empathy fails. A poetics of alterity has implications for efforts to understand individuals’ illness experience and grounding an ethics of care.

The issue of international membership introduces the related issue of international rights holding. International rights holding amounts to being “in”—that is, being recognized as legitimate and, as such, as having rights. But the membership process through which a collective actor gets “in” and comes to enjoy the status of rights holder also has a selective and exclusionary character. There is an interrelated process of denial of rights holding for other collective actors. An illustration of how international membership associated with international rights holding can have this selective and excluding effect is the impact of international law on rights holding in the framework of colonialism—an impact so significant that it continues to have a legacy today. Thus, the selective character of international membership has a cost for international rights holding not simply for the societies at odds with the requirements of statehood but also for their individual members.

The introduction serves a threefold purpose. First, it aims to sensitise the reader to the all-pervasiveness of humanity in international criminal justice, more in particular in the discourse on the atrocity crimes. This part of the introduction argues that the concept of humanity provokes more questions than it is meant to solve. Second, it outlines the book’s methodology to the reader. Third, the introduction sketches the main argument of the book through an overview of the chapters.

Chapter 1 critically engages with existing academic work that either emphatically argues in favour of, or radically dismisses the appeal to humanity within international law. The important critique on the invocation of humanity notwithstanding, I argue that a concept of humanity as a collective subject, or normative community, is needed, in order to grasp what is at stake in dehumanisation.

On their first arrival in North America, Europeans entered a strange land but, most of all, an unfamiliar Indigenous economy. While capitalism functioned on a disembodied trade of goods or an abstract exchange of currency, Native societies honored the idea of the gift. On this belief in a gift economy, Indigenous people nurtured trade relations, but also diplomacy, war alliances, marriage, friendship, and peoplehood and ecology themselves. This chapter elucidates the idea and operation of an Indigenous gift economy, as it served and serves Native nations, and explores the gift’s impact on and disruption of European and American capitalist market economies. From this alternative Indigenous economic approach, as presented in anthropology as well as in traditional Indigenous thought, we turn to several representative works in American literature, from ancient myth and early testimony to autobiography, novel, and poetry, to illustrate the place of Indigenous ceremony, such as the giveaway and the potlatch, in its resistance to destructive colonial policy such as removal and allotment. Ultimately, Indigenous gift exchange economies give voice to America’s haunted money, from wampum to bucks, in which Native land was never “the gift outright.”