This chapter looks at the work and critical reception of B.S. Johnson (1933-73), focusing on the influence that the development of the critical term postmodernism on his reputation by dividing it into three stages of two decades each: before postmodernism (1960-1980), during postmodernism (1980-2000) and after postmodernism (2000 to present). It argues that Johnson’s career was essentially proto-postmodernist, engaged in a struggle to undermine the realist hegemony of the 1960s, but that the theoretical concerns of postmodern writing were at odds with his own and it was never a term he used or had the opportunity to refute. As a result his work remained unassimilable while postmodernism held sway and only later- with the aid of a biography- could criticism get to grips with Johnson’s double-coded rejection of convention and commitment to his own brand of social realism.

This chapter explores material language practices and their interaction with language ideologies. It investigates how oral, literal, and digital forms co-constitute discourses of normativity and prestige. Through observations of literacy practices, teaching, media, and participants’ reflections, the chapter studies materialisations of language and their ideological implications. The dominance of English writing in formal and institutional contexts contrasts with the variable use of oral Kriol, which resists standardisation. Efforts by the National Kriol Council to create a standardised orthography reveal tensions between fostering linguistic legitimacy and maintaining the anti-standard nature of Kriol. Digital communication amplifies these dynamics, bringing to the fore non-standardised writing that reflects local linguistic realities. Kriol’s oral and multimodal characteristics, perceived as spontaneous, creative, and resistant to disciplinary norms, challenge Western-centric ideologies that prioritise fixed standards. This shows that material language practices are culturally specific. A consideration of the role of materiality in language ideologies challenges universalised epistemologies.

This chapter introduces the study of language ideologies and the relationship between language, social belonging, and social order, particularly in the context of late modernity. It approaches linguistic categories as discursively constructed rather than naturally occurring. This frames language as a key lens for understanding human social organisation, emphasising that ideas about language reflect and co-construct broader social and political ideologies. Through a discussion of sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological theories, the chapter critiques essentialist views of language. It introduces concepts such as social indexicality, standard language, prestige, and centring institutions to explore how language acquires social meaning and status. The chapter also examines the material dimensions of language, including the role of writing, sound, and tangible artefacts such as grammars and dictionaries in shaping linguistic ideologies and language categories. It lays the foundations for understanding languages as dynamic, constructed phenomena embedded in specific historical, cultural, and material contexts.

This chapter theorizes payment infrastructures as crucial material sites of hegemonic power in three different regards. First, the material form of payment technologies and the uneven routes of circulation produced by them are an integral part of the ways in which modern money and finance exercise power. Payment technology is not a neutral infrastructure, but a carrier of hegemonic power and potential site of hegemonic contestation. Second, payment infrastructure is inextricably connected to state security and sovereignty. State security and sovereignty were enabled and made durable with and through the payment infrastructure. Third, infrastructures are historically durable, though they may be rerouted or reinscribed. This chapter distills three elements that typify the hegemonic power of infrastructure and that can be used when taking “infrastructure” as the starting point for analysis. These elements are (1) sedimentation, (2) reach, and (3) disposition. The arguments are illustrated empirically by reference to the so-called financial war on terror, where financial infrastructures became a major but highly depoliticized site of security power. Empirically, this chapter focuses on the way in which the payment technology SWIFT and financial transactions are being appropriated for security purposes.

In this chapter, I explore the intersection of spatiality and postcolonial literary writing through a focus on African literatures, broadly speaking, and the practices of worlding therein. Both as a market category and as a subset of what is variously termed ’world literature’ or ’postcolonial literature’, African literary writing offers a rich case study of the ways in which literature functions not merely as a passive repository of space or site of spatial representation, but as a driver of the constitution and performance of space itself. In this manner, the literary functions not as discrete or autonomous but through its entanglements with broader material, social, and ideological circuits. To do so, this chapter begins with an overview of postcolonial spatiality before moving to questions of aesthetics, form, publicness, and circulation to consider the diverse and sometimes divergent ways in which the performance of spatiality in African literary writing operates across uneven and asymmetrically loaded networks of production and distribution. The chapter ultimately argues that differential performances of spatiality in various bodies of African writing demonstrate the ways in which practices of worlding remain mediated by the material, structural, and systemic constitution of literature.

The introduction posits the relevance of the history of fair trade activism to the history of postcolonial globalization to highlight three striking transformations: decolonization, the rise of consumer society, and the emergence of the internet. It underlines the importance of studying ‘moderate’ movements as part of a social history of globalization. It goes on to relate the history of fair trade to earlier historiography, demonstrating how the history of third-world movements, consumer activism, and humanitarianism can be combined to better understand the history of this movement. It finally introduces the structure of the book, which takes its cue from the materiality, which was crucial to the development of the fair trade movement by centring five products: handicrafts, sugar, paper, coffee, and textiles.

A poet celebrated for his syncretism, Shelley’s sense of fluidity arguably extends to his understanding of sex and sexuality, as he wrote during a time of peak flexibility and transition in thinking about gender-sex. Reading Erasmus Darwin’s descriptions of variously sexed plants, Ovid’s tales of shapeshifting, and William Lawrence’s intertwinement of sexed and racialised bodies, Shelley, the great poet of relation, comes to see the body as materially shifting, porous, and relational. Reading passages from A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love alongside the figure of nonbinary, intersex creation in ‘The Witch of Atlas’, Asia’s transformation into the posthuman ‘lamp of light’, and the nonhuman ‘shape all light’ in ‘The Triumph of Life’, this essay suggests Shelley began to understand polymorphous sexuality connected to sexed bodies of shapeshifting, mutable morphology.

The final chapter serves to draw the various strands of the book together, surveying what has been discovered, and expanding on the fundamental arguments of the book. It therefore begins with an analysis of Pinterest, which stands as an emblem of all that literacy means in postdigital times, whether that be sophisticated multimodal practices, durational time, or algorithmic logic. Looking back over the screen lives discussed in the book, including those of the crescent voices and of Samuel Sandor, this chapter crystallizes the personal take on screen lives that the book offers, reiterating the need to ‘undo the digital’ and find the human in, on, with, at, and against screens. It also presents some of the problems scholarship must meet, such as digital inequalities, whether that be in terms of time, awareness, or skill with technology. However, despite the considerable negative forces at work in screen lives which the book has taken care to unravel, this concluding chapter advocates ‘taking the higher ground’ and enacting wonder in interactions with screens.

The concluding chapter summarises the key findings of the book by juxtaposing the workings of Accra’s old, established station with the designated function of a government-mandated and top-down administered public road transport terminal – the ‘new station’, as Accra’s urbanites have pithily dubbed it. It scales up the comparison to consider the significance of urban infrastructure as a ‘hard’ technical system and as a ‘soft’ system of sociality in relation to questions of governance, social order, and the significance of usage. Finally, it reflects on the broader implications of this study by pointing out empirical and theoretical continuities with the practices, places, and politics of urban hustle that go beyond this particular case of a West African bus station.

Abstract: This chapter examines 1870s children’s literature materially. It does this by emphasising, first, the children’s book as a material object and, second, the process of producing children’s literature within the material conditions of Victorian publishing. A discussion of the distinctive material attractions of the movable picturebook for children, such as three-dimensional pop-up pictures and manipulable mechanical figures, sets up the chapter’s focus on the value added by considering the material configuration of word and image in other books from the period. This facilitates a reassessment of well-known texts including Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Kate Greenaway’s Under the Window (1879), and Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song (1874). Features such as the distribution of illustrations across pages, the variation of editions’ content, and illustrations changing from manuscript to print restore children’s classics as materially specific objects rather than timeless texts conveyed immaterially from the 1870s to the present

Jane Lê and Paul Spee set an agenda for the growing body of research exploring the role of materiality in strategy research. In their overview of existing work, they differentiate four different approaches to materiality: the communication approach; the technology approach; the sensemaking approach; and the positivist approach. They explain the assumptions inherent in each approach and how these assumptions affect the way we understand and study strategizing. They conclude with an outline of different avenues for future research on materiality in strategizing.