Interests, desires, and appropriations by modernist theatre practitioners of aspects and materialities of other cultures for the renovation of their theatre traditions cohered under the term ‘orientalism’. Later twentieth-century postmodernist theatre practitioners revived the practice in a largely postcolonial world, but under the umbrella term ‘interculturalism’. Using the tenets of postmodern theories (simulations and bricolages) or the principles of rituals from traditional cultures, intercultural theatre thrived in a globalised world. While globalised culture came under critique for appropriation and exploitation, early twenty-first-century scholars sought to revive interest in the study of otherness in theatre but operated again under such new terminology as ‘interweaving performance cultures’ and new interculturalism from below. Simultaneously, scholars from the Global South and from Asia further contested West/East axes of intercultural borrowing and theorising as well as the trajectory of western-centric modernism. This chapter traces those trajectories and their histories.

Chapter 2 explores how American policymakers built a government-sponsored housing finance model during and after the Great Depression. While the country entered the depression without major national housing programs, it emerged with an expansive toolkit of demand-side housing policies. The FDR administration discovered that subsidizing home mortgages would produce economic cascade effects by stimulating bank lending, construction, employment, wages, and consumer spending, reinforcing the country's emerging demand-led growth regime. The core idea behind New Deal housing programs was to transform mortgage markets to lower the cost for borrowers and minimize risk for creditors. These initiatives included the Federal Housing Administration's mortgage insurance program, which offered affordable mortgages to millions of homeowners - although excluding racialized minorities. These housing initiatives helped overcome the depression and permanently made housing finance a "national champion," albeit one heavily dependent on state support. Reinforcing housing-based growth became a routine response to address economic challenges well into the post-WWII period.

As the situation in South Vietnam deteriorates, American Catholics wrestle with the morality of American intervention in Vietnam in light of Vatican II. A triangular relationship develops among those who support US intervention, those who oppose it, and those who are critical of the methods employed by the US and its South Vietnamese ally.

This chapter turns to memetic experimentation. Meme blends, meta-memes, or cases of ‘memeception’ (or recursivity in memes) all manipulate aspects of form to create new meaning effects. Antimemes, on the other hand, do not alter the form, but change the viewpoint structure and so, the meaning. Some memes, finally, appear to enjoy memetic form for form’s sake, and border on art forms; the so-called Loss meme is our main example here.

This chapter considers the use of pronouns, and how they relate to such roles as Meme Maker, Meme Character (depicted in a meme’s image), and Meme Viewer (i.e. the ‘reader’ of a given meme). One illustration of how odd pronouns actually behave in memes is to consider the use of I, which does not refer to the Meme Maker, but is used to represent embedded discourses attributed to a depicted Meme Character. Just as curious is the use of me, in patterns such as Me Verb-ing, or Me/Also Me, which apparently instruct us to look for Meme Maker in the meme’s image, which in fact shows an unrelated Meme Character (possibly non-human, like an animal), such that the depicted character represents the experience of the Meme Maker. Such examples show that deixis is used in unusual ways in memetic discourse, to support the expression of viewpoint and stance targeted in the meme, rather than to identify specific referents.

While modernism has been historically bounded by time and characterised by shared aesthetic and philosophic elements in Europe and the United States, the project of identifying modernism in other contexts around the globe is less straightforward. While modernism in the theatre of Europe influenced modernism throughout the world, the modernist movements of East and South Asia, Africa, and Latin America are not derivative. Rather, they are unique and organic, borrowing and blending European themes and forms with indigenous ones and adapting the material to the tastes and politics of each region. The timelines of these modernist movements also unfold differently within different regional and national contexts, sometimes extending well beyond the traditional endpoints of modernism in a European context. This essay examines several key developments in Japan, China, India, the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire, and Argentina as case studies of the modernist theatre in non-European contexts.

The fifth and final chapter analyses how people of African (and indigenous) descent practiced Catholicism in the 1770s to 1790s. It puts villages in the interior Caribbean and haciendas in Antioquia in conversation with the mines of the Pacific, revealing both how there were longstanding rural autonomies and possibilities and how they could be swiftly destroyed by the arrival of conquering missionaries or visiting judges. The chapter illustrates how Catholicism was at once a mode of colonial governance and transcultural, local, and interstitial. The first section examines the reducciones of arrochelados by the conquering friar Joseph Palacios de La Vega and is followed by a discussion of trials for illicit relations in Antioquia as part of a violent Enlightenment drive to reorder colonial (and especially black) life. It concludes with an analysis of baptismal and confirmation records from the mines of Nóvita, which reveal the extent to which people of African descent and the worlds of the mines of the Pacific transformed Catholicism.