This chapter considers the work of major First Nations figures in Australian poetry – Oodgeroo, Kevin Gilbert, Mudrooroo and Lionel Fogarty – as well as poetry produced by current or former First Nations inmates of Australia’s prison system or about First Nations deaths in custody. The language of these poets is both politically activist and community enhancing. It argues that the effects of such poetry can be redemptive, empowering or visionary. It considers such poetry as testimony, discussing the ways in which First Nations writers have created a poetic language that might not have been available, which, in turn, creates a community of readers and listeners. For many First Nations prison inmates, poetry becomes a mean to ground Indigenous identity and reflect on their lives and relationships. From the 1990s, poets such as Samuel Wagan Watson, Romaine Moreton, Ali Cobby Eckermann and Yvette Holt have broken new ground with work highlighting Aboriginal selfhood in an evolving Australian society. The chapter concludes with a consideration of a younger and emergent generation of First Nations poets.

This chapter examines the ways in which Judith Wright shaped Australian literary culture, not only through her poetry but also through her work as an editor, anthologist and critic. It contextualises the development of Wright’s poetry in light of her childhood, education and the impact of World War II, arguing that misreadings of her pastoral lyric during Wright’s lifetime failed to appreciate how it undercut settler mythmaking. The chapter discusses Wright’s exploration of a psychic interior during the 1950s and how she became increasingly focused on the settler-colonial mind during the 1960s. It outlines Wright’s engagement with Aboriginal land rights and her leadership in the burgeoning environmental movement. The chapter ascribes much of this change to the influence of Oodgeroo Noonuccal and discusses their poetic correspondence and friendship in the 1970s. The chapter also considers her turn from poetic voice towards practices of observation and listening, arguing that Wright’s attention to ‘the human pattern’ evident in her last volume, Phantom Dwelling, suggests less a silence in her later years than a realignment of her focus and energy.

This chapter is an overview of the life and work of Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker), whose poetry collection We Are Going (1964) was not only the first ever book of poetry by an Aboriginal person but also one of the fastest-selling books in Australian history. It traces her early involvement in civil rights in Queensland, her ongoing activism in Aboriginal struggles, and the power of her poetry to articulate the feelings and lived experiences of the Aboriginal people. It discusses Oodgeroo’s friendship with Judith Wright and her founding of Moongalba, an Aboriginal cultural and education centre on Noonuccal country. The chapter outlines her role in various national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts organisations and her international connections with Indigenous writers. Lastly, it emphasises Oodgeroo’s lifelong work in foregrounding Aboriginal cultural and political perspectives.

The concluding chapter offers three short ethnographic accounts of dance events in twenty-first-century Kolkata to argue how nautch has an afterlife. It persists, despite sustained bureaucratic attempts to legally annihilate it. It continues to be carried by bodies under compulsion and bodies with volition. Nautch has morphed into modern-day baiji dances in private rooms and into choreographed spectacles on public stages. A dance and performance studies lens shows how nautch has endured as a profession, a form of waged labour at times shrouded in secrecy, and in other moments displayed proudly in civic spaces. Its legacy of stigma hangs like a curse on multiple professional dance communities across India, who continue to grapple with the shame that accompanies a life of dancing, as other scholars have found. But the afterlife of nautch also features insistent and localised revolutionary movements, such as those led by sex workers’ collective Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) and its cultural wing Komal Gandhar in Kolkata. The chapter ends with a discussion of how Komal Gandhar’s dancing collectively activates spaces of possibilities, of new forms of decriminalised citizenship and of more equitable futures of social belonging.

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 concluding chapter, “Governing the Unknown: Legal–Scientific Settlements,” offers a new framework to describe the momentary stabilization of scientific facts in and through lawmaking: legal–scientific settlements. From these legal–scientific settlements emerge a range of distributional consequences that have material effects on people’s lives and shape the ability of individuals to survive and thrive despite public health crises.

This chapter explores how the ranching-grabbing RDPE is supported by moral economic changes, which in this context is veneration for the cowboy lifestyle and scorn of traditional/Indigenous livelihoods. The cowboy lifestyle is often seen in a positive light, despite the violence that accompanies forest removal. These changes in the moral economy help to explain how locals increasingly welcome ranching-land speculation, even inside multiple-use conservation areas. Another key factor in deforestation processes are the policies and infrastructure investment decisions made at the federal and state level, which render large areas available for appropriation. These problems are also international, as groups expanding deforestation are still often funded by international banks, creating investment lock-in, as investors are more interested in preserving returns on investments than curbing illegalities. Simultaneously, there is a wide variety of activists in local communities who are resisting these extractivist pushes. The chapter examines where and how Indigenous peoples/forest-dwellers successfully resist land grabbing and clearcutting on their lands.

There is a long history of forest activism in Finland, including both contentious protest like blockades and more conventional actions like negotiation. There is a new generation of activists stemming from Extinction Rebellion and other environmental groups, who have extended occupations beyond logging sites to company headquarters and pulp mill entrances. This chapter focuses on this latest generation of resistance and the ways those involved have approached forestry activism in Finland. The protests against state-sponsored logging in different parts of Finland are used as examples to unpack the current contentious politics of forests and especially the sentiments of these rising youth activists. The overall actions of several Finnish forest movements since the 1980s have contributed to more and more people starting to defend forests, questioning the forest industry’s story that clearcutting is a sustainable way to interact with the forest. This chapter is based on extensive interviews with experts and activists and the author’s lived experiences and many years of ethnography in Finnish forests, especially in the most heavily logged forestry frontiers in the southeastern part of the country.

In this chapter, Catherine Morris focuses on the Revival as part of a revolutionary era in Irish history, an era that saw the formation of national identity and national institutions. She shows how revival feminism links the freedom of Ireland to the freedom of women by focusing on the artistic work and social and political thought of neglected or under-studied feminists and activists such as Maud Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory, Eva Gore-Booth, and Helena Molony. Prominent in this group of activist feminists was Alice Milligan. Milligan’s writings offer a rich context for grasping the idea that activist feminists shaped the Revival and provided an intersectional political space for women. She provides a way to reconsider the importance of the Irish Revival and to emphasize forgotten or neglected elements of it. Morris’s research on revival feminism, but especially her work on Milligan, becomes itself part of the revivalist continuum of political engagement.

This chapter introduces the book’s motivation: to understand how activists use identity to manage the apparent contradiction between the promises of legal inclusion and persistent forms of marginalization. The chapter illustrates the importance of the issue through discussion of the activism of two lesbian groups – Free Gender in Cape Town, South Africa, and La Fulana in Buenos Aires, Argentina – that form the focus on the book. Both organizations strategize sexual identity in tandem with other racial, class, and gender identities, albeit in different ways. The chapter presents the conceptual background of the book, which adopts a historical approach to understanding LGBT inclusion into citizenship and explains the relevance of intersectionality to contemporary LGBT organizing. The chapter previews the theoretical framework developed in Chapter 1 that accounts for key differences in how the two organizations strategically use multiple identities. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some of the methodological aspects of the research and presents the plan for the rest of the book.