This chapter focuses on the diverse manifestations of the feminist movement in Africa and its impact on African literature. It further examines how African women’s writing has contributed to African feminist theorizations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Borrowing Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi’s idea of reading African women’s writing as “theorized fiction” or “fictionalized theory,” the chapter considers, among other issues, how twentieth and twenty-first-century African women’s writing has grappled with questions of gender and how gender is variously conferred and defined; questions of motherhood and how it is configured and contested; and questions of sexuality and the female body. The chapter also pays close attention to the epistemic shifts and various decolonial trajectories that obtain in African feminist thinking and how these are enunciated in African literature.

The Equality Act provides protection against discrimination on the ground of various protected characteristics: sex, race, disability, age, religion and gender. It protects against direct discrimination where there is adverse treatment because of a protected characteristic, and also indirect discrimination where the same rule is applied to all groups but has an unjustified and disproportionate adverse effect on a group. Adverse treatment includes harassment and victimisation. There is in addition a duty of reasonable accommodation for disabled workers. The law also requires equal pay for women for similar work or work that has equal value to that performed by men.

Scholarship on the gendered dimensions of US foreign relations flourished in the twenty years following the appearance in 1986 of Joan Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category of History Analysis.” But a worrisome drop-off in the last decade or so merits a reminder that gender matters and that we have good tools for integrating gender analysis in our work. This chapter encourages historians of US foreign relations to pay careful attention to the types of sources we use and the questions we ask of them; the assumptions and stereotypes that permeate diplomatic interactions; the ways in which gender helps create, maintain, and justify hierarchies of power; and the role of sex and sexuality in shaping relations between the United States and the world.

This chapter addresses the principle of non-discrimination within international administrative law. It examines how international administrative tribunals distinguish between types of discrimination—direct, indirect, positive, and negative—and outlines the allocation of the burden of proof in these cases. The chapter reviews grounds of discrimination, such as race, gender, nationality and place of residence, age, and disability. The jurisprudence spans a variety of contexts, including recruitment, salaries and financial entitlements, career progression, pension rights, and contract termination. The chapter also analyses the principle of equal pay for equal work, a cornerstone of the prohibition of discrimination, discussing its scope and limits. While many rulings reflect a high standard of scrutiny, some structural forms of discrimination persist within employer organisations, particularly concerning gender. The chapter concludes that, despite advancements, international administrative tribunals continue to play a crucial role in addressing and reducing discrimination through judicial oversight.

Chapter 4 first examines two societal groups – labor and women – and asks two questions. How have these groups fared since the 1980s? And how have they responded to top-down changes in India’s political economy? The final part of the chapter also discusses civil society activism and social movements more generally. As with Chapter 3, Chapter 4 highlights that the story of India since the 1980s is not wholly top-down. While the state and business remain dominant actors, societal groups have challenged and continue to challenge that domination.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book. It sets the stage by highlighting contrasts in India’s economy, democracy, and society. It then discusses the main topics covered in the book – democracy and governance, growth and distribution, caste, labor, gender, civil society, regional diversity, and foreign policy. The chapter also outlines the three themes that comprise the main arguments of the book. First, India’s democracy has been under considerable strain over the last decade. Second, growing economic inequalities that accompanied India’s high-growth phase over the last three and a half decades are associated with the country’s democratic decline. Third, society has reacted to changes from below but there are limits to societal activism in contemporary India.

English historical sociolinguistics traces the transition of a ‘small’ language into a ‘big’ one. Old English was a small language in terms of its regional coverage and number of speakers, whereas Present-day English is a comprehensively documented world language with hundreds of millions of first-language speakers. Its 1500-year history involves gradually developing social structures of different timescales, but it was also affected by abrupt changes brought about by forces such as invasions and pandemics. Sociolinguistics highlights the agency of language users in shaping and changing their language and, consequently, the society they live in. Written records on individual language use are sparse from the earliest periods but multiply as people from different walks of life become literate and pass on data on their linguistic practices. With time, increasing efforts are, however, also expended on regulating usage with the aim of language standardisation.

Examines gender and race/ethnicity related to conversation memory.

This chapter introduces the volume’s central premise that the uneasy relationship between Bloomsbury’s broad influence and perceived elitism is precisely why it continues to gain traction in critical debates. Instead of viewing the group as either radicals or gatekeepers, it is necessary to grapple with Bloomsbury’s imperialist biases and class complacencies at the same time as we resituate the group’s innovative aesthetics, transgressive relationships, and varied involvement in public life in national and global contexts. In response to Raymond Williams’ classic 1980 essay “The Bloomsbury Fraction” – which in considering Bloomsbury’s social position as an upper-class “fraction” settles into a relatively stable description of the group’s form – I propose friction as a more tangible and productive concept to explore Bloomsbury and its lasting contribution to culture.

This chapter places Bloomsbury at the center of the story of meritocracy in twentieth-century Britain by considering four figures: H. A. L. Fisher, President of the Board of Education in Lloyd George’s wartime cabinet and Virginia Woolf’s cousin; educationalist Bertrand Russell; Virginia Woolf, who critiqued meritocratic systems in Three Guineas (1938); and Angelica Garnett, who examined meritocracy in Deceived with Kindness (1984). The chapter argues that Fisher was the architect of a vision of technocratic meritocracy that sought to overcome competition through the promise of a flexible educational system that could meet the needs of every child. Russell and Woolf were critics of the mindscape of meritocracy. Both associated competitive educational systems with militarism, while Woolf harnessed her pacifist critique of meritocracy to feminist ends. Angelica Garnett explores the affective aspects of meritocracy’s ethic of individual effort, competition, and reward. As Garnett’s memoir suggests, exclusion from the meritocratic journey was as defining an experience as inclusion in its rites and rituals.

The way in which our understanding of and approaches to Bloomsbury have been changed by feminist and gender scholarship is under discussion in this chapter. In the main, however, it addresses the gender politics of Bloomsbury itself primarily through how Bloomsbury artists engaged with feminism and gender in their creative endeavors and in their personal relationships, and how their gender politics accorded with or diverged from what was happening in the broader public sphere in terms of social movements such as suffrage, and cultural institutions such as marriage. The chapter discusses Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and E. M. Forster, among others. Far from seeking to present a coherent position among the group, this chapter teases out the contradictory and shifting views of various members. It ends by considering the group’s legacy in terms of whether and how Bloomsbury contributed, artistically and politically, to the reorientation of gender in its day, and ours.