Praise for this book This is much anticipated book that investigates a less explored area of rhetoric and writing in a non-Western and indigenous context. Well-crafted arguments from Dr. Marohang Limbu’s comprehensive research help build a strong and compelling case to study indigenous identities from a thought-provoking perspective. – Yowei Kang, PhD, Assistant Professor National Taiwan Ocean University, Taiwan This is an important and ambitious work that crosses linguistic, cultural, and geographic boundaries. In doing this transdisciplinary scholarship, Limbu is making key contributions to indigenous and scholarly communities. In bridging these areas, his scholarship informs work in writing and language studies, cultural rhetorics, and globalization. – Steven Fraiberg, PhD, Associate Professor Michigan State University, USA The book, based on the fieldwork in four countries (Nepal, India, UK, and USA) across four continents, on the development of Sirijanga script and Limbu culture and history promises to bring deep insights, relying on oral history, archival and archeological research, and interviews, on how culture and traditions of an indigenous people survived inhospitable political regimes in Nepal and India, and how the community and network of activists across contingents are working to preserve and expand it after the advent of open political regimes in South Asia. – Mahendra Lawoti, PhD, Professor Western Michigan University, USA Limbu’s groundbreaking book informs indigenous rhetorics and provides a new methodology for ethnohistorical research. Scholars looking to understand how to ground their research in indigenous contexts can employ his “delinking, relinking and linking” methodology to connect with various populations. Limbu’s historical uncovering of Himalayan Yakthung writing traditions, oral history, and culture makes the case that global digital communities can help span local, regional, and transnational contexts and inform indigenous rhetorics in surprising new ways. – Gustav Verhulsdonck, PhD, Assistant Professor Central Michigan University, USA Marohang Limbu has done a superb job at canvassing his own delinking, relinking, and linking theory in Yakthung’s writing, rhetoric, and customary traditions, and this book adds a milestone and becomes invaluable asset in the history of Yakthung writing and rhetorics. – Ambar J. Limbu, Associate Professor Tribhuvan University, Nepal This book is an extremely rich, immensely persuasive, and utterly compelling piece of substantive Yakthung writing and rhetoric documentation, including analyses and interpretations. It demonstrates the immense power of Marohang’s delinking, relinking, and linking theory in the context of the 21st century both in academic and popular cultures. – Govinda B. Tumbahang, PhD, Former Governor Region No. 1, Nepal Marohang Limbu has explored Yakthung Indigenous historical cultural artifacts, oral texts, and documents and analyzed and interpreted the way they have never been done until the 21st century. This book will contribute a lot and will add a milestone in the history of Himalayan Yakthung Indigenous studies. – Arjun Limbu, Associate Professor Limbuwan Study Center, Nepal Marohang Limbu’s book is judicious, informed, and incisive, inviting the enthusiast into a serious of critical engagement with even the most difficult selections while avoiding the simplistic categories that mar too many anthologies. In this book, Limbu makes compelling arguments on the exploration, interpretation, and documentation of Himalayan Indigenous writing and rhetorics ever anybody has done to the ground reality.

Is it possible for the Third World to escape from the constraints imposed by the world's economic system? What room for manoeuvre do these states have, and are they condemned to dependence? These are some of the questions Samir Amin confronts in Delinking. He argues that Third World countries cannot hope to raise living standards if they continue to adjust their development strategies in line with the trends set by a fundamentally unequal global capitalist system over which they have no control. The only alternative, he maintains, is for Third World societies to 'delink' from the logic of the global system - each country submitting its external economic relations to the logic of domestic development priorities, which in turn requires a broad coalition of popular forces in control of the state. Delinking, he shows, is not about absolute autarchy, but a neutralizing of the effects of external economic interactions on internal choices.

This study is a critical commentary connecting issues of development with the latest thinking in sociology, critical theory and social science. It addresses questions such as the connections with globalization, and culture and modernity.

In The Politics of Decolonial Investigations Walter D. Mignolo provides a sweeping examination of how coloniality has operated around the world in its myriad forms from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. Decolonial border thinking allows Mignolo to outline how the combination of the self-fashioned narratives of Western civilization and the hegemony of Eurocentric thought served to eradicate all knowledges in non-European languages and praxes of living and being. Mignolo also traces the geopolitical origins of racialized and gendered classifications, modernity, globalization, and cosmopolitanism, placing them all within the framework of coloniality. Drawing on the work of theorists and decolonial practitioners from the Global South and the Global East, Mignolo shows how coloniality has provoked the emergence of decolonial politics initiated by delinking from all forms of Western knowledge and subjectivities. The urgent task, Mignolo stresses, is the epistemic reconstitution of categories of thought and praxes of living destituted in the very process of building Western civilization and the idea of modernity. The overcoming of the long-lasting hegemony of the West and its distorted legacies is already underway in all areas of human existence. Mignolo underscores the relevance of the politics of decolonial investigations, in and outside the academy, to liberate ourselves from canonized knowledge, ways of knowing, and praxes of living.

Words like “colonialism” and “empire” were once frowned upon in the U.S. and other Western mainstream media as worn-out left-wing rhetoric that didn’t fit reality. Not anymore! Tatah Mentan observes that a growing chorus of right-wing ideologues, with close ties to the Western administrations’ war-making hawks in NATO, are encouraging Washington and the rest of Europe to take pride in the expansion of their power over people and nations around the globe. Africa in the Colonial Ages of Empire is written from the perspective that the scholarly lives of academics researching on Africa are changing, constantly in flux and increasingly bound to the demands of Western colonial imperialism. This existential situation has forced the continent to morph into a tool in the hands of Colonial Empire. According to Tatah Mentan, the effects of this existential situation of Africa compel serious academic scrutiny. At the same time, inquiry into the African predicament has been changing and evolving within and against the rhythms of this “new normal” of Colonial Empire-Old or New. The author insists that the long and bloody history of imperial conquest that began with the dawn of capitalism needs critical scholarly examination. As Marx wrote in Capital: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moment of primitive accumulation.” Africa in the Colonial Ages of Empire is therefore a MUST-READ for faculty, students as well as policy makers alike in the changing dynamics of their profession, be it theoretically, methodologically, or structurally and materially.

With the adoption of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement, the purpose of development is being redefined in both social and environmental terms. Despite pushback from conservative forces, change is accelerating in many sectors. To drive this transformation in ways that bring about social, environmental and economic justice at a local, national, regional and global levels, new knowledge and strong cross-regional networks capable of foregrounding different realities, needs and agendas will be essential. In fact, the power of knowledge matters today in ways that humanity has probably never experienced before, placing an emphasis on the roles of research, academics and universities. In this collection, an international diverse collection of scholars from the southern African and Nordic regions critically review the SDGs in relation to their own areas of expertise, while placing the process of knowledge production in the spotlight. In Part I, the contributors provide a sober assessment of the obstacles that neo-liberal hegemony presents to substantive transformation. In Part Two, lessons learned from NorthSouth research collaborations and academic exchanges are assessed in terms of their potential to offer real alternatives. In Part III, a set of case studies supply clear and nuanced analyses of the scale of the challenges faced in ensuring that no one is left behind. This accessible and absorbing collection will be of interest to anyone interested in NorthSouth research networks and in the contemporary debates on the role of knowledge production. The Southern AfricanNordic Centre (SANORD) is a network of higher education institutions that stretches across Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Botswana, Namibia, Malawi, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Universities in the southern African and Nordic regions that are not yet members are encouraged to join.

Data from a variety of languages are offered in support of the claim that although there are several processes by which languages commonly add to an already existing stock of long vowels, there is only one mechanism by which a language without a distinction of vocalic length commonly introduces such a distinction. This mechanism is the coalescence of vowel sequences, typically after loss of intervocalic consonants. This book examines vowels lengths, their differences and their effects on language.