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Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 caused ideological confusion in South Africa, which holds Russia in high esteem as a Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) partner and a major player in Africa's political economy since 2000s. Against this background, this article examines the coverage of the Russia–Ukraine war on selected days from the start of the war to April 2022 on the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). Through content analysis, the study concludes that war-related topics that received the most coverage were security, peace, United Nations, and civilians. War-related topics that received least coverage on SABC News were sanctions, battlefield, EU policies, nuclear, U.S. policies, justification, and disinformation. The article argues that SABC News coverage was largely objective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the British Government's decision to establish the Royal Commission on the War in South Africa and how the Edwardian press presented its findings to the public. It will discuss how the Conservative media attempted to downplay the significance of the report and how the Liberal and Radical presses attempted to use it to raise questions about the Government's ability to manage crises and, by linking the failures of military planning to new Conservative economic and education policies, challenge the competency of the Colonial Secretary and powerful Unionist leader, Joseph Chamberlain. Finally, it will show how the press, regardless of political leaning, remained supportive of the military leadership which conducted the war effort despite it playing a significant role in the faulty planning and operational failures of 1899. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The law of treason has been criticised for being based on 'outdated' statutes which are inflexible and unsuitable for modern needs. However, a historical examination of the evolution of treason in Britain and its empire suggests that the law was often adaptable. In nineteenth century England, jurists wished to rein in older constructive treasons, to leave the 1351 Act as the appropriate law for wartime treasons, while the more lenient 1848 Act was to be used against 'political' conspiracies to subvert the state by force. However, the 'constructive' treasons remained part of the law, and were given new life in imperial contexts. In Ireland and Canada, the idea that plotting the king's 'political' death was treason remained central to understandings of the 1351 Act. In India, the interpretation of the provision of the penal code against 'waging war' against the government was influenced by old English ideas of 'constructive' treason and used against those who challenged British rule. Imperial understandings of treason were also shaped by cases arising out of the Boer war, where the underlying law was Roman‐Dutch law. Rather than being restrictive and unable to adapt to modern needs, the law of treason was flexible and malleable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of Sol Plaatje's Mafeking Diary, one of the best-known episodes of the South African War of 1899-1902. This article sets out the reasons why this should be celebrated. We look at how Plaatje's diary came to be written, at the ideas and assumptions that Plaatje brought to the task of writing it, and we describe its most important qualities and characteristics. Why is it that, compared with his other writings, Plaatje's diary has been relatively neglected and under-appreciated? We look for the answers in the inclination of historians to approach the diary as a source of evidence rather than as a work in its own right; of literary scholars to focus on literary forms more familiar than the indeterminate genre of the diary; and the way in which the weight of subsequent South African history has made it difficult for a wider reading public to appreciate the nuances of a work written over a century ago. We argue that the Diary needs to be understood in the context of the particular circumstances of the late nineteenth-century Cape Colony, and that it should be celebrated and enjoyed--as a piece of writing of the highest order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the interconnectedness of liberalism between Britain and the U.S. from 1870 to 1920, challenging the perception of separate developments in each country. It highlights the transatlantic influence on political ideologies and reform movements, emphasizing the collaboration and parallels between American Progressivism and British reformers during this period.

After the South African War (1899–1902), state-makers' efforts to control 'dagga' was controversial on several fronts. But 'dagga' also proved a moving target for official classification. Was it a species of Leonotis, common around the countryside? Was it 'Indian hemp', understood by some as a habit-forming drug that debilitated wage workers and caused insanity? This paper traces dagga as a multiple object and problematic of governance in South Africa during the years before the formation of the Union of South Africa and into the early decades of the Union period. A focus on three contested boundaries of top-down knowledge-making and policy – botanical taxonomies; colonial geographies; and political-economy – demonstrates dagga's shifting ontologies across time and space. Together, these empirical snapshots combine as a case study, revealing how the legal reification of a substance as a 'drug' involved political processes that were local, dispersed and unresolved. We show how uncertainties and ambivalences about cannabis long remained productive for different brokers and gatekeepers who navigated the frontiers of competing interests. This history is important for understanding the changing politics of cannabis in South Africa, as it became legible for regulation as a 'dangerous drug' during the first half of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gilley references Rathbone, I Murder and Politics i , 98. 13 Biggar, I Colonialism i , 64. 14 Ibid., 73-4. 15 Ibid., 82. 16 Ibid. 17 See Nigel Biggar, "The Drayton Icon and Intellectual Vice", I Quillette i , August 27, 2019.https://quillette.com/2019/08/27/the-drayton-icon-and-intellectual-vice/ References 1 Biggar, Nigel. Jon Wilson, in his review in I History i , thinks the same thing: 'Biggar presents his arguments as a challenge to a vast group of historical scholars he describes as "anti-imperialist", and who see empire as a "unitary ... colonial project" whose "persistent violence" was "oppressive and exploitative"'.[8] As Lester notes, Wilson concludes that '[w]ith I Colonialism i , Biggar has created a masterwork in the art of constructing straw men'. In his "review" of my book, Alan Lester never once takes his foot off the pedal of criticism. Among other things, Gilley reports that Rathbone concluded (in the very same work from which Lester quotes) that the case against those accused of the sacrificial murder in 1944 was "undeniably a strong one".[12] Professor Lester also reports that "specialists" regard "medicinal and mortuary killings" in the region as "aberrant and exceptional". The facts, which I published in January 2018 and have since been available online for over five years for anyone to read, are as follows.[2] There were three online denunciations - not two as Professor Lester thinks - the first issued by Common Ground, a "decolonising" student body in Oxford, on or before 14 December 2017;[3] the second, by a body of 58 mainly junior "Oxford scholars" on 19 December;[4] and the third, by a group of academics worldwide on 21 December.[5] What Professor Lester refers to as the "second" letter was in fact the third. [Extracted from the article]

As Banks reminds us, Brandes never employs the concept of "race", but instead prefers language and culture as the primary determinants of the identity of "a people" ( I et folk i ). Thus, Brandes often focuses on the monolingual language policies of the German Reich (Prussification in Northern Schleswig and Western Poland) or of Czarist Russia (Russification in Finland, and in partitioned eastern Poland and Ukraine). [Extracted from the article]

The First World War (1914-18) saw the role of sport in British military and civil society closely dissected and widely discussed. Popular journalism, memoirs, novels, and poetry provided the British public with a regular diet of war stories and reportage in which athletic endeavor and organized games featured prominently. A study of this contemporary literary material sheds light on how far the image of the sporting warrior, and the association between games and combat, survived the horrors of industrialized killing between 1914 and 1918. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the haunting voices in Thomas Hardy's Boer War poetry. It examines Hardy's interrogation of military campaign through voices in the departure of troops at the outbreak of the Boer War, the influence of the Crimean War in his poetry, depiction of the scenes of London, England and the death of the drummer boy, and the use of dactylic sound and sense of the word drearily to counter the seductive sound of patriotic and warlike poetry.

This article focuses on the relationship between an member of parliament (MP), their constituency, and their local party and examines the case of Herbert Lewis the MP for Flint Boroughs who was pressured by his constituents and local Liberal Association due to his opposition to the South African War. Topics include Lewis' career and relationships, his opposition to the war and eventual shift in stance, and the factors contributing to his change of viewpoint.

It was significant that Britain, as the world's dominant sea power, led the way, as committing 'to such a stringent neutrality policy gave force to the concept of neutrality domestically as well as internationally'.[6] The chapter then charts how the neutrality policy fared in conflicts after 1870. Given the recent controversy concerning Britain and breaches of international law, Gabriela Frei's book on the attitudes of successive British governments to this issue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a timely study. Notes 1 Frei, I Great Britain, International Law, and the Evolution of Maritime Strategic Thought, 1856-1914 i , 12. 2 Frei, I Great Britain, International Law, and the Evolution of Maritime Strategic Thought, 1856-1914 i , 2. 3 Frei, I Great Britain, International Law, and the Evolution of Maritime Strategic Thought, 1856-1914 i , 24. 4 Frei, I Great Britain, International Law, and the Evolution of Maritime Strategic Thought, 1856-1914 i , 17. 5 Frei, I Great Britain, International Law, and the Evolution of Maritime Strategic Thought, 1856-1914 i , 17-18. 6 Frei, I Great Britain, International Law, and the Evolution of Maritime Strategic Thought, 1856-1914 i , 42. 7 Frei, I Great Britain, International Law, and the Evolution of Maritime Strategic Thought, 1856-1914 i , 84. 8 Frei, I Great Britain, International Law, and the Evolution of Maritime Strategic Thought, 1856-1914 i , 82. 9 Frei, I Great Britain, International Law, and the Evolution of Maritime Strategic Thought, 1856-1914 i , 2. 10 Frei, I Great Britain, International Law, and the Evolution of Maritime Strategic Thought, 1856-1914 i , 109. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores Britain's decision to intern over 5,000 captured Boer (Afrikaner) combatants on the island of Ceylon from 1900 to 1902 during the South African War. Using hitherto unanalysed source material, this manuscript resolves several unanswered questions regarding the experience of Boer internment in Ceylon itself and whether the internment experience matched Britain's imperial expectations. Given the sheer number of captured Boers who refused to accept British sovereignty, Britain initially resolved to send these captives overseas to prevent the possibility of prisoners rejoining the Boer struggle. With the Boers originally sent abroad for security purposes, this manuscript examines how Britain moved from simply detaining the prisoners to formally rehabilitating and reeducating them as imperial citizens. The article argues that while internment in Ceylon did pacify the Boers, Britain nonetheless failed to convince the Boers to discount their culture and heritage in favour of a greater British imperial identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the study is to summarise several factors which greatly influenced the course of British-German relations on an alliance and at the same time explain the foundations for the actual emergence of these negotiations. Within the framework of the established goals, it maps out the situation of the British Empire at the turn of the twentieth century, while accenting the Imperial problems which Great Britain had to face. The Second Boer War, the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion and the Fashoda Incident had an essential influence on these events. As a result of these above-mentioned events, Britain reached the conclusion that the politics of Splendid Isolation were no longer sustainable and began to seek out a suitable ally on the international scene. They considered several candidates, one of which was Germany. The negotiations fell apart due to different interests and views about the direction of internal development. The incompatibility of the views was most apparent in the approach to European politics where Germany wanted the involvement of Great Britain in the Triple Alliance, which was unacceptable for London. On the other side, Berlin refused to accept the steps to limit Russian influence on the Far East. The confusing diplomatic approach of Baron Eckardstein, first secretary of the German embassy in London, also contributed to the break- down in negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dark tourism involves tourists visiting sites of death, disaster and depravity. Well known dark tourism sites include Chernobyl in the Ukraine, the 9/11 Memorial in New York, and the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Battlefields of World War I and II are also excellent examples of dark tourism sites. Dark tourism has become a niche tourism sector with great potential for future tourism growth. In South Africa, the FSGLTA acting as the marketing arm of the Free State, targets to increase its tourism numbers and therefore are looking for means of growing the tourism arrivals towards the province. Dark tourism has been identified as one of their ways to grow tourism. The main objective of the paper is to reveal the niche tourism potential of the Free State by focusing on the South African War (1899–1902). The broader aim is to establish the typical profile of South African War enthusiasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The South African War of 1899–1902 occurred during Australia's Federation era, a period that defined the future composition of the nation. It also marked a significant site of transformation in the provision of war pensions from charity alone to a coordinated response between charity and the state. During the conflict, pensions and benefits were deemed a privilege bestowed on deserving recipients, an approach in contrast with the inviolable duty felt by Federal authorities towards returned soldiers during and after World War I. This article examines 'acts of grace' within the surviving South African War pension and charity archive to determine how political and military authorities embodied ideas about Australian nationalism and gender in their consideration of those in need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Müller argues that the two Andrew Murrays were not simply responsible for infusing the DRC with enthusiasm for missions to black Africans - as earlier writing has emphasised - but that they saw themselves as missionaries to the Boers. Andrew's brother John became the first professor at Stellenbosch Seminary, antecedent of Stellenbosch University. Another nephew, A. A. Louw, became the first DRC missionary to Mashonaland, and married the sister of D. F. Malan, the first apartheid-era prime minister of South Africa. [Extracted from the article]

Germany desired to contact the wartime opposition in South Africa in order to obtain accurate political and military intelligence. The arrival of Hans Rooseboom in South Africa in 1940 provided the Ossewabrandwag (Oxwagon Sentinel), a quasi-cultural and anti-war movement, with the means through which to initiate two-way communication with Germany. The so-called Rooseboom secret service became the first German intelligence network to operate in South Africa during the early war years. This article investigates the nature and operation of the so-called Rooseboom secret service from 1941 to 1942 against the backdrop of the larger intelligence war waged in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

General J.H. (Koos) de la Rey was, according to historians, a Christian Afrikaner and a Boer aristocrat. Not only did he play a leading role in the Boer community of the old Transvaal - in the 1890s he was a well-known member of the Volksraad or highest governing authority in the South African Republic - but in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 he became a Boer general who distinguished himself by leading his burgers in attacks on British military structures and skirmishes on horseback. De la Rey became known as a military strategist of the first rank. In the run-up to the Anglo-Boer War, which started on 11 October 1899, De la Rey tried to avoid this war with Britain as long as he could. After the war became a reality, he gave himself for his country as a die-hard fighter or "bittereinder": somebody who fights till the bitter end. Apart from his natural military abilities, General De la Rey had a soft spot and a feeling for stressed people. He helped badly wounded enemies and in May 1902, in Boer talks about peace, he listened with compassion to those Boers who had suffered much and pleaded for peace, convincing him that they had reached the end of their tether - literally the end of the bitter end. De la Rey did not speak much at meetings, but during the peace talks at Vereeniging from 15-31 May 1902, he urged and influenced his people to accept Britain's peace proposals. In the end, De la Rey and the die-hard fighters among the Boers who had fought for their political independence against British imperialism fought for self-rule under British rule as soon as possible. De la Rey wanted the Afrikaner people to maintain their identity as a nation in new circumstances and not to be wiped out as a nation through the Anglo-Boer War. He died as a leader and a hero of his people in 1914. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that David Dutton traces the political voyage of one members of parliament through the changing currents of Liberalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Topics include literature devoted to the problems of the British Liberal Party in the first half of the twentieth century; and difficulty of retaining men and women of considerably differing outlook and ideology contentedly within the same political movement and organization.

The article presents the discussion on perspectives in International Relations. Topics include giving significance to the Anglo-Boer War and the formation of the Union of South Africa as critical moments in the making of the international manifesting in the post-First World War period; and thinking institutions across dominions grappling with the conceptual basis and policy implications of recalibration.

Key moments of the American Civil War and the 1899–1902 South African War and their tragic immediate aftermaths remain powerful features of national memory in both countries. Over the past century, vengeful politicians and ideologues in both have transformed them into formidable stock-in-trade. Second-, third-, and fourth-hand accounts of the alleged churlish manner of the victorious armies, especially soldiers of African descent, were made into combustible timber for reactionary political campaigns. The perceived cruel turns of fate have made their way into literature, stage, and screen. The two wars afforded people of various races and social conditions opportunity to act upon their conceptions of a just society, albeit amid terrible carnage and loss. They also underscored the permanence of the industrial transformation of both countries. In the decades following these two wars most of the black and white agrarian populations discovered that state and agrarian elites had cynically manipulated and then extinguished their aspirations. Most often, for black agrarians, violence was the preferred instrument to pursue desired outcomes. Reconstruction in the American South was a paradox. The Civil War emancipated the slaves but left the entire South, especially upland cotton regions, economically backward. In Louisiana, especially, politicized violence to coerce black labor was pervasive. After the South African War, white violence against rural black people was widespread. Lord Milner's Reconstruction Administration was more concerned to bring South Africa's gold mines back into production than to stem the violence. The low-intensity violence of the postwar countryside became the backland route to apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Military enlistment is highly selective for reasons of both labor demand and supply. An early-twentieth-century evolution of military technology that shifted the demand for workers of different stature illustrates the importance of labor demand beyond the commonly discussed influences originating with labor supply. English-born soldiers in the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) were taller, on average, than those of World War I (1914–18), yet these differences cannot be attributed to standard of living or business cycle influences on the labor market. Rather, we argue, the mechanization and bureaucratization of warfare increased the relative value of shorter people permitting a decline in the average height of soldiers. Technological change over the period of these two wars affected labor demand in a way that must be recognized before using this evidence to test hypotheses about changes in population health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Second World War (1939–1945), black South Africans displayed apathetic attitude and disloyal tendencies towards government. They were disillusioned with the racially induced social, economic and political discrimination policies of the state. Authorities established systems and exploited mass communication platforms such as the print media, radio and films to disseminate propaganda towards blacks. The intended objectives were to combat apathy and to mobilise black loyalty and cooperation during the war. This article focuses on state propaganda towards blacks against the backdrop of structural constraints and inherent inconsistencies pertaining to the pursuit of justice, freedom and democracy abroad, and a segregated political framework within the country. It commences with a brief overview of South Africa's political dynamics associated with the outbreak of the war, then outlines the government's propaganda policy and rationale. Thereafter, it describes the institutional arrangements to facilitate propaganda dissemination, followed by an analysis of the different measures, media platforms, contents and main themes, including the responses of blacks to propaganda. The article seeks to illustrate how propaganda was conducted to mobilise black opinion and support, and the extent of its effectiveness and limitations within the context of divisions and discriminatory policies and practices in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the point of view of its internal temporality, the Romanian novel between 1933 and 1947 demonstrates an overwhelming preference for negotiating the present. After 1933 the world had already gone through a World War and a world economic crisis - so that the metabolism of the present in post-1933 Romanian novels can also be explained as a post-traumatic shock, an attempt to process the traumatic information of recent history. But the Romanian novel, in its earlier ages, had been synchronous with historical events of relatively comparable magnitude: the European Revolution of 1848, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, translated in Romania as the War of Independence, the Romanian economic crisis from 1899-1901, the peasant uprising of 1907, with its bloody repression, the Balkan wars, the Great Union of 1918, etc. And yet, this succession of historical events did not have the effect of establishing the historical present as a preferential time of the Romanian novel. Only the Romanian novelist between 1933 and 1947 clearly prefers "recognition" in the present history, in the immediate actuality; the narrative no longer means for him the construction of a patrimonial memory, but almost exclusively a construction of the historical present. Between 1933 and 1947, the Romanian novel is synchronized with its own present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though the Pan Africanist Congress was formed in 1959 after departing from the African National Congress at a point marking out the irreconcilability of the Azanian 'faith' with the other interpretations of the struggle within the 'broad church' of the Congress Movement, it was only six years later, in 1965, that it modified its name to the PAC of Azania. The name Azania is supposed to have been suggested by Nkrumah at the All-African Peoples' Conference in 1958 attended by the Africanists even before the inauguration of the PAC (Diaz 2009: 239; Hilton 1993: 5). The Azanian tendency in 'South African' history can arguably be said to have existed from the earliest times of resistance by the indigenous people against the unjust wars of colonisation (see Dladla 2020: 71–108). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book does two things: it relates German military history from about 1871 to the post-Cold War era, and in parallel it evaluates what this history means for the traditions and ultimately the overall spirit of today's German armed forces, the Bundeswehr. The book successfully demonstrates the interaction between military, political and diplomatic aspects and reveals the dramatic transformation of the domestic political scene in relation to the war effort. I Alejandro O'Reilly, Inspector General: Military Power, Family and Territory during the Reign of Carlos i I iii i Oscar Recio Morales is a renowned professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, who has devoted part of his research to the presence of the Irish in Spain, especially in the military, as evidenced by his I Ireland and the Spanish Empire 1600-1825 i (Dublin, 2010). I 25 April: From the Military Coup d'État to the Revolution as It Happened i The Carnation Revolution - as the Portuguese military coup on 25 April 1974 came to be known - remains a unique experience of a military revolution led by young military officers, mainly captains, which put an end to a colonial war and a 48-year-old dictatorial regime. If "military history" is taken to mean the history of campaigns and battles, plus some military technology thrown in, then yes, this is a useful compendium. [Extracted from the article]

War poetry by South Africans represents the embodiment of angry poetic bodies. These bodies are conduits for Fanonian "muscular demonstrations". They embody reaction and resistance to world conflicts and colonial oppression of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and carry textual traces of intergenerational memory construction and trauma. The construct of poetic bodies serves as a conceptual framework through which to analyse the war experiences of civilians and soldiers. In this article, the major forms and themes of South African war poetry are discussed as embodiments of these poetic bodies, which consist of language and memory traces within various historical milieus. These contexts include the South African War (1899–1902), the 1906 Zulu rebellion, the First World War (1914–1918), the Second World War (1939–1945), the civil war in the townships (ca 1961–1994), and the Angolan/Namibian Border War (ca 1966–1989). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE CHINESE PRESENCE IN AFRICA, A CURRENT PERSPECTIVE South Africa has been home to generations of ethnic Chinese people before the arrival of newer migrants from the Republic of China (Taiwan) and People's Republic of China (China). Emerging China-Africa relations in the context of increasing mobility - The Chinese presence in Africa from a historical and current perspective Since the 2000s, when the Chinese presence in Africa is mentioned, "the Chinese" no longer refers only to the people, whether they are ethnic Chinese holding non-Chinese passports or Chinese nationals living overseas, but also to the current deeds of the Chinese state. [Extracted from the article]

Mountainous terrain has distinctly influenced combat operations throughout history. Warfare at high altitude often takes place in extreme weather conditions and over difficult terrain, which is largely considered to be inaccessible, inhospitable, and at times lacking any apparent strategic or operational value. As a result, combat operations at high altitudes are traditionally infantry affairs. The South African deployment to East Africa during the Second World War was for the most part characterised by highly mobile operations, across deserts and scrubland, where infantry, armour and artillery deployed in a mutually supportive role. The penultimate battles of the East African campaign were, however, fought in extremely severe terrain, where the South African troops would experience the harsh realities of mountain warfare for the first time during the war. This article broadly investigates the exigencies of mountain warfare, and critically reflects on the South African wartime experience of mountain warfare in East Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The remainder of Boers fighting the last part of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), are known as the die-hards. However, the characteristics of a die-hard or bitter end were not defined or uninamously recognized by the Boers. In the circumstances of April-May 1902 peace talks began and led to the signing of a peace treaty on 31 May 1902. In the development of the discussions among themselves a realisation was reached by the vast majority of the 60 Boer delegates that this was inevitably the end of the bitter end: the die-hard end. Hierdie besef word binne 'n Christelik-historiese en etiese perspektief bespreek. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The academic field of postcolonial studies is founded upon the idea of comparison across nations that experienced colonialism. This cluster of essays raises the question: among the many possible pairings for comparison, what justifies the comparison of Ireland and South Africa as a field of study worthy of a special issue? Given the different colonial histories of the two nations, such a project could aim to show that they are not as unconnected as might at first appear, sharpen our understanding of both by showing their distinctive responses to similar conditions, or demonstrate the complexity of global networks of influence and exchange in the sphere of culture. These essays accomplish all these goals, considering, among other topics, the backing given by Irish nationalists to the Boers in the Anglo-Boer War, the strong support for the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, the significant role of South African figures in Irish political negotiations, and the links between Irish and South African literary works. As is pointed out by Parsons in his introduction, the asymmetry of the relationship is evident in most of these areas. Taken together, the contributions to this cluster demonstrate the varied ways in which a postcolonial lens can bring into focus connections forged across extended geographical distance and in spite of substantial historical differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]