Kete is a music and dance form originating from the Asante and also primarily performed by the Akan people of Ghana. Like all indigenous knowledge forms, Kete possesses a nuanced history interwoven with mysticism, sociocultural elements, and historical factors. “The Akan people of Ghana include the Asante, Akwamu, Akyem, Denkyira, and Fante ethnic groups who occupy a large portion of Ghana” Gerry R. Cox and Neil Thompson, “The Akan of Ghana,” in Managing Death: International Perspectives, ed. Gerry R. Cox and Neil Thompson (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022), 85–89, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05559-1_9. They primarily occupy the southern part of the country. Within Asante cultural practices, music and movement systems hold a significant place in life. Beyond their communicative functions, these systems act as vital links connecting the past, present, and future. Kete is a traditional dance-music form originally confined to the palace of the Asantehene and subchiefs, who hold the authority to have traditional music and dances in their palaces. The Kete dance has gone through many changes since its break away from the older Adowa form, and as Joseph Kaminski (2007) shares, “the music of Kete is reputed to possess the power of attracting good spirits […] [Nketia] explains that the surrogated texts extol high moral values through the telling of heroic ideals and a Kete dance must be developed with the involvement of symbolic hand gestures reflecting these values. It is danced barefooted and trained male dancers dance with their Lapa cloth lowered beneath the chest” (“Asante Kete drumming: music from Ghana,” 2007).

There are different accounts attributed to the origins of the Kete Dance form, but this volume employs the two main accounts in my unpublished thesis of 2015 titled The Contexts and Meaning in Asante Dance Performance: The Case of Kete by Emmanuel Cudjoe, The Contexts and Meaning in Asante Dance Performance: The Case of Kete (Accra, Ghana, University of Ghana, 2015). These two are by no means authoritative over the many other accounts that exist about the dance, but they offer interesting insights into the scholarly departure points this book elaborates.

The Garden of God: Liminal Reimaginings and Revolutionary Politics

The Garden of God is (and has been from the beginning) a space locating us in time, indeed, creating our times. For this us-in-time is indeed storied, embedded in narratives of loss and recovery, set on edge toward identity and away from supposed otherness, imagining futures of rebirth and reunion. As Donna Haraway puts it, every story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation – that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the Other. These plots are ruled by a reproductive politics – rebirth without flaw, perfection, abstraction (Haraway 2016, 58).

In her evocative 1985 essay, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, Haraway conjured up the ‘inde-terminate’ and thus revolutionary ‘liminality’ of the cyborg precisely to disrupt such essentialistic entanglements about both gender and human identity but also to reimagine a truly revolutionary politics – one not indebted to the founding myth of the garden. Haraway's essay, which ‘almost immediately, became a watershed text for feminist theory […] as well as feminist science studies’ (Prasad, 432), imagined the revolutionary potential of the cyborg as a way of subverting the ‘phallogocentric’ myths of Western cultures, all of which were based on the bifurcation between ‘man’ and machine, organism and mechanism, and behind these, on the claims of human exceptionalism to divide culture from ‘nature’. While the myth of the garden, of innocence and loss, shaped ‘man’, Haraway noted, the imagined indeterminate and liminal identity of the cyborg frees it from the claims of such mythic space and narrative identity:

And Zeus said: I think I have a scheme whereby men may exist yet stop their licentiousness: we'll debilitate them. We'll slice each of them into two, he said, and they shall both be weakened and more useful to us.

Now since the natural form of man had been severed into two parts and each half yearned for its match. So that's how it is, you see, that the love of one another is ingrained in men, ever since that time. It restores his ancient nature to man, and ventures to make one out of two, and heal the human condition […] Each of us, then, is the matching half of a man, because we were sliced like flatfish, and two were made out of one! And everybody carries on an eternal search for his other half.

Introduction

In his Symposium (dated 370–385 BCE), Plato recounts a creation myth of humans: split in two by Zeus for defying the gods, constantly searching and yearning for their other half, to be complete again. This description is not simply an exercise in dialectic dialogue; it is based at least partly on objective reality. Charles Darwin posited that man's evolutionary journey began with bisexuality (here, bisexuality is understood as sexual ambiguity, where we retain atavistic features of the other sex). From a physiological perspective, the embryo begins sexually undifferentiated for six weeks before first signs of the chromosomal sex are acquired. From a psychoanalytic perspective, human beings are born with an innate sense of psychicbisexuality, that is, without a solidified sense of ourselves as either male or female. This chapter explores the consequences of this split in half, the mourning for the other half, and the yearning to become a whole self once again.

The mature gender identity with the correlated aspects of masculinity and femininity is primarily dependent on the socio-cultural environment. One's gender is not merely limited to identifying as a man or woman; it represents a painful process of splitting of the infantile psyche, internalisation and repudiation. For healthy develop-ment the repudiated fragments need to be acknowledged, and their loss, appropriately mourned.

From Kingdom of God to Gardens of God

Integral development calls for rethinking the conventional discourses of religion, society and polity such as the Kingdom of God. In self, society, religion and politics, we are accustomed to the language and discourse of the Kingdom of God. But then, here, God is presented as an omnipotent king who is also angered by slight deviations. We get glimpses of this powerful and angry God in the Old Testament as well as in many other religious traditions of the world. In such a discourse and portrayal of God, we fail to realise that God is rahim (mercy) and karuna (compassion). God is our ever-awakened nurturer, and He/She is continuously walking and meditating with us with mercy as well as firm challenges for self-development, mutual realisation, and responsible cosmic engagement and participation.

Encounters in moments contain seeds of creativity and transcendence. In December 2016 before going to the musical performance in Narada Gana Sabha in Chennai during Chennai's annual music season, I passed through a bookstore nearby from another music concert in T. Nagar. There I came across Harvey Cox's book How To Read the Bible. I was familiar with the work of Cox and had met him during my visit to Boston in 1988 during my graduate studies at The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. I had taken part in a week-long Consciousness Raising Walk organised by Habitat for Humanity, a Christian ecumenical movement building houses for and with the low-income in 1988 from Portland, Maine to Boston, Massachusetts. Meeting Harvey Cox in his book after so many years in 2016, especially when he tells us in his book ‘The Kingdom of God is within you’, in Aramaic, is to realise that the Kingdom of God is across you (2015) touched me. It planted seeds of thinking, meditation and exploration, which led to many workshops and lectures on the theme in India and outside. I wrote an essay ‘Gardens of God’, which constituted the opening essay for a special issue on the theme in Gandhi Marg 42 (4), Jan–March 2021, which was followed by another special section in the same journal—Gandhi Marg 43 (1), April–June 2021.

Drama, Dreams and Future Design

Gardens of God, Paradise – terms arousing visions of places and times of long-gone happiness, peace and harmony. Some people believed the place was originally on earth and tried to find the place where Adam first put his feet on earth. The terms are used for touristic advertisements as a metaphor for mostly distant, highly romantic, desirable and affordable places, and they are similarly used to create ideological islands as mythical, unreal, unscientific and pleasant utopias.

Opinions today are divided on ideas such as the Gardens of God. To touch on the Bible not only betrays the creationist but also reminds of the origin of human drama. It is abhorred, avoided and ridiculed by believers in natural science. It may be allowed in fiction or in studies in the humanities but not in true applicable science. New myths of eternal growth of scientific progress are vigorously propagated to overcome the fear caused by the perceived drama of our political, social and cultural existence. They did away with religion, Gods and Gardens of God. Easily accessed information allows the educated to know all about the obsolete myths, their origin, significance and tradition without listening to what they may tell us even today.

Lamentations about the lost paradise lead the pious sage to dreams of return; they fuel the daring scientist to project a better future; they inspire a few enthusiastic realists to challenge the present to find out the general plan of past, present and future. There is a task ahead to overcome religious backwardness, illusory planning and overcoming hubris and arrogance to advance conscientiously step by step. Humbly admitting there must be some proposed path, a telos our understanding does not yet discover, let us go for it.

Meditating on Myths

Pope Francisco remarks, ‘Obviously the biblical story of creation is a mythical form of expression to explain, what happened. But it is a development, an evolution.’ In his honest, convincing and touching appeal to begin a dialogue with scientists and all scientifically minded members of the human family about the Earth's future, he does not dwell on the ‘mythical form of expression’. The metaphysical question of the Beginning is overruled by the turn evolution took in the Anthropocene.

Rape culture is endemic and devastates women because their bodies and sexualities are controlled by patriarchy through inducing fear of rape. Lisa Levy argues that: “[i]f crime fiction is a mirror of society that reveals our deepest and longest held fears, as I believe it is, then rape culture is one of those fears writ large in novels about men who violate women (sexually or otherwise).” Given how endemic rape culture is, it is therefore not surprising that it is a constant theme in crime fiction. However, the crime genre's treatment of the theme of rape is often ambivalent. Rape culture is a key issue for the #MeToo movement and fourth-wave feminism. Jessica Ringrose, Kaitlynn Mendes, Sophie Whitehead, and Amelia Jenkinson argue that the term rape culture describes social contexts where “sexual violence against women is implicitly and explicitly condoned, excused, tolerated and normalised,” and where female victims are held responsible for their rape. Alisa Kessel traces changing feminist analyzes and approaches to rape culture since the 1970s second-wave feminism. Using an intersectional approach, Kessel argues that rape culture must be seen in wider contexts as supporting “white supremacy, heteronormativity, xenophobia, and colonialism.” This chapter investigates rape culture through the analysis of Allison Leotta's The Last Good Girl (2016), Y. A. Erskine's The Betrayal (2012), and Heather J. Fitt's Open Your Eyes (2022). Prior to this, I examine how the portrayal of rape in earlier crime fiction can be reevaluated through fourth-wave feminist perspectives, using Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's crime novel Roseanna (1965) as a case study. Importantly, other chapters in this book also depict rape culture in their analysis of crime fiction texts, including rape culture affecting women of color and trans women. This chapter, then, investigates how contemporary crime fiction reflects and extends feminist campaigns against contemporary rape culture and its manifestations. The main objective of these campaigns is to call attention to the threats of violence and assault that women face, and ways of articulating feminist resistance to these very real and visceral forms of oppression. This chapter examines a fundamental feminist question, demonstrating how crime fiction in the age of #MeToo is interrogating rape culture through the genre.

God is a multidimensional reality and possibility, and from the dawn of life, there are varieties of visions, practices and discourses of God as He / She/ It relates to human, nature, divine, society, culture, politics and the world. There are those who believe in God who are called theists; who do not believe in God called atheists; and those who are sceptically open about God known as agnostics. God is not confined to all these. God is a perpetually invitation and challenge for self, society and the world to be more creative and embody the compassion, and vastness of creation in our everyday lives as well as in our social and institutional relations. God has not just created the world as an external Creator, God has become Creation.

In the summer of Australia 2020, the magnificent garden forests of Eastern Australia groaned with the pain of years of careless neglect and indifference by people resistant to the warnings that global warming was burning our land.

The annual bushfires reached such terrifying, life-destroying heights never before witnessed across this vast land, so used to the harsh challenges of flood, fire and famine. Soul-destroying, fear-inducing and lifestyle changing, people sat in their ashes knowing that this is what we must expect. Yet from the bottom of life's cinder-pit, all would hold fast to their trust that within a season or two, the new shoots of greenery would appear as the signs of new hope. With a new flow of life's energy, they washed away their tears to birth their renewed community.

Mysticism: Challenges, Dangers and Pardes

There are several places from which one might initiate this discussion. One is the definition and purpose of mysticism. Religion, by its very etymological Latin-language definition, seeks to bind (-lig-) us back/again (re-) to the source that has created us. Mysticism contends that there is a hiddenness (mysterion in Greek) within God, which everyday, garden-variety religion cannot reach, but to which the mystic seeks access. To achieve that access is to become one with God: to be filled with Godness.

Accessing the mysterion involves three challenges, three dangers, two complications and one definitive positive consequence. The challenges are: can one find a way ‘in’ to the mysterion (noting that spatial concepts are meaningless when dealing with this realm, so ‘in’ is just a term of convenience); can one find one's way back ‘out’; and can one articulate the experience to others. One of the obvious prerequisites of the first challenge is that one must empty one's self of self, in order to be completely filled with God. This aspect of the first challenge helps to explain part of the nature of the second challenge and with it the threefold danger: that one cannot get ‘back’ because one cannot regain one's sense of self. Failing that, one may die, go mad or apostatise.

This set of conditions leads to two related complications: if one cannot get back, or having ‘returned’ one cannot somehow communicate what the experience was, then one has failed to really have the experience, the point and purpose of which is to help improve the spiritual life of the community of which one is part (be that a small group or the entire human race). The related complication is then obvious: that one's goal in seeking to enter/be filled with the mysterion is not – cannot – be simply to achieve one's own enlightenment, for that would be too self-ish. One's goal must be to achieve enlightenment in order to enlighten others.

This also makes clear the definitive positive consequence of the mystical enterprise: that having succeeded – in emptying one's self of self, being one with/being filled with the divine mysterion, becoming enlightened and returning to everyday reality able to improve the world (or one's small corner of it) – is an immeasurably wonderful experience.

Borders

Over hundreds of millennia, human beings have settled all over the world. For more than two hundred thousand years, Homo sapiens moved frequently in search of sustenance and shelter. Then, some 12 to 11,000 years ago, Natufian communities chose a sedentary life in the Levant, even before the rise of agriculture. The investment of labor in agriculture, however, meant that it made even more sense to settle in one place, thereby also creating early forms of property relations between human beings and land. Crossing the boundaries of someone's land could now potentially clash with the unlimited movement and settlement of everyone. With the establishment and expansion of sedentary communities, ever larger territories were thought of belonging to someone until we reach the current age in which we imagine the globe as an absolute map. It is absolute, because, on this map, there are no more white spots. Global space is now “disjunct (no spot can belong to two), categorical (a spot either belongs or it does not), and exhaustive (no spot goes un-belonged)” (Geertz 1995: 21). This means that wherever you are on our planet, you find yourself in a politically defined territory. Standing on the border between Jordan and Syria, for example, you might ask yourself if this particular pebble is Jordanian or Syrian or what might be the nationality of the swallow that is airborne and migratory most its life. The absolute map of the world creates the illusion that our planet and all of its soils, minerals, waters, flora, and fauna belong to someone.

Yet, in reality, the absolute map of the world does not prevent human (and other animal) mobility. A casual glance at the global air traffic at any given time reveals the immensity of human movement across international borders. If we were to add a map that charts every other human border-crossing movement on Earth, we would have a most rich and intricate depiction of travel routes and pathways. What such a map would not show, however, is the profile of those who have permission to cross international borders and those who do not. Other images are needed to expose the many attempts to cross international borders without official authorization.

1. Introduction

Since the early twenty-first century, the issue of borders, borderlands, and their crossings has become one of the most prominent topics (Gonsior 2014). In recent times, the US– Mexico border has revealed a highly politicized zone. And with the complex reality of illegal border crossing, high petroleum activities, drugs, and human trafficking are the predominating narrative of both countries’ borders. Unfortunately, the Native American tribes of the Southwest, the Tohono O’odham Nation, have become a central community for such illegal border crossings due to sloppy enforcement policies on tribal land (Gurbacki 2014: 274–280). Another burning border narrative for both countries and these indigenous people is former president Trump's administration's steps to build a wall around the border to halt unauthorized migration.

Though border historians consider borders as social constructs inside territories and identities, the media's portrayal of borders, particularly in film, must be seen as a form of cultural production that is clearly a potent tool for national territories (Staudt 2014). Since the dawn of commercial filmmaking, the border has been a common backdrop in feature films. The region bordering the US–Mexico border is perhaps one of the most often displayed landscapes in North America. Almost since the inception of the movie business, the filmic depiction of the longest contiguous international boundaries has been a central problem in both national and international films. The U.S. film industry has produced thousands of films about border issues between the US and Mexico. And Mexican movie industry has an almost similar history of representing the US–Mexico borderlands. (Gonsior 2014)

While the film continues to expand as the most popular form of visual entertainment, a stunning body of work on the America-Mexico relationship in Hollywood blockbuster films to well-known art by well-known directors has formed cinematic borders known as “popular culture.” (Dell’Agnese 2005). Surprisingly, the advent of borderlands scholars coincided with the creating of a new type of motion picture known as “borderland films” (Brégent-Heald 2015). This concept is also comparable to the term “border cinema.”