Adejunmobi highlights the continuing appeal of local identities for participants in social networks where communication occurs in languages that are not mother tongues. He shows how in West Africa notions of localness & locality remain important despite the growing prominence of global languages.

Ogunyemi uses the novels to trace a Nigerian women's literary tradition that reflects an ideology centered on children and community. Of prime importance is the paradoxical Mammywata figure, the independent, childless mother, who serves as a basis for the postcolonial woman in the novels and in society at large. Ogunyemi tracks this figure through many permutations, from matriarch to writer, her multiple personalities reflecting competing loyalties. This sustained critical study counters prevailing "masculinist" theories of black literature in a powerful narrative of the Nigerian world.

A groundbreaking work of ethnography, urban studies, and theology, Mark Gornik's Word Made Global explores the recent development of African Christianity in New York City. Drawing especially on ten years of intensive research into three very different African immigrant churches, Gornik sheds light on the pastoral, spiritual, and missional dynamics of this exciting global, transnational Christian movement.

The discipline of international relations offers much insight into why violent power transitions occur, yet there have been few substantive examinations of why and how peaceful changes happen in world politics. This work is the first comprehensive treatment of that subject. The Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations provides a thorough examination of research on the problem of change in the international arena and the reasons why change happens peacefully at times, and at others, violently. It contains over forty chapters, which examine the historical, theoretical, global, regional, and national foreign-policy dimensions of peaceful change. As the world enters a new round of power transition conflict, involving a rapidly rising China and a relatively declining United States, this Handbook provides a necessary resource for decisionmakers and scholars engaged in this vital area of research.

In an age of accelerating ecological crises, global inequalities and democratic fragility, it has become crucial to achieve renewed articulations of human commonality. With anchorage in critical theory as well as world literary studies, this volume approaches literature - and modes of literary thinking - as a key resource for such a task. "Universality" is understood here not as an established "universalism", but as a horizon towards which intellectual inquiry and literary practices orient themselves. In the field of world literature, there is by now a wide repertoire of epistemological resources through which claims to universality can be both questioned and reconfigured. If, at one end of the spectrum, world literature confronts us with the spectre of homogenisation and the commodification of difference under a regime of global capitalism, at another end renewed forms of philological, anthropological and ecological attentiveness to the particulars of languages and texts within the crucible of connected histories allow for defamiliarising perspectives both on received historical narratives and aesthetic practices. Vernacularity emerges here as a central point of reference for constructing the universal from within the particular, the idiomatic, and the experiences of social subordination or complicity.

The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography provides an accessible, authoritative and comprehensive overview of this growing body of research, combining ethnographic approaches with close attention to language use. This handbook illustrates the richness and potential of linguistic ethnography to provide detailed understandings of situated patterns of language use while connecting these patterns clearly to broader social structures. Including a general introduction to linguistic ethnography and 25 state-of-the-art chapters from expert international scholars, the handbook is divided into three sections. Chapters cover historical, empirical, methodological and theoretical contributions to the field, and new approaches and developments. This handbook is key reading for those studying linguistic ethnography, qualitative research methods, sociolinguistics and educational linguistics within English Language, Applied Linguistics, Education and Anthropology.

Language, whether spoken, written, or signed, is a powerful resource that is used to facilitate social justice or undermine it. The first reference resource to use an explicitly global lens to explore the interface between language and social justice, this volume expands our understanding of how language symbolizes, frames, and expresses political, economic, and psychic problems in society, thus contributing to visions for social justice. Investigating specific case studies in which language is used to instantiate and/or challenge social injustices, each chapter provides a unique perspective on how language carries value and enacts power by presenting the historical contexts and ethnographic background for understanding how language engenders and/or negotiates specific social justice issues. Case studies are drawn from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North and South America and the Pacific Islands, with leading experts tackling a broad range of themes, such as equality, sovereignty, communal well-being, and the recognition of complex intersectional identities and relationships within and beyond the human world. Putting issues of language and social justice on a global stage and casting light on these processes in communities increasingly impacted by ongoing colonial, neoliberal, and neofascist forms of globalization, Language and Social Justice is an essential resource for anyone interested in this area of research.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. This book sets out to understand how the meaning of ‘literature’ was transformed in the Global South in the post-1945 era. It looks at institutional contexts in South Africa (mainly Johannesburg), Brazil (São Paulo), Senegal (Dakar) and Kenya (Nairobi), and engages with critical writing in English, Portuguese and French. Critics studied in the book include Antonio Candido, Tim Couzens, Isabel Hofmeyr, Es’kia Mphahlele, Léopold Senghor, Taban Lo Liyong and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. By reading these intellectuals of the Global South as producers of theory and practice in their own right, the book attempts to demonstrate the contingency of what is her called the worlding of the concept of literature. ‘Decolonisation’ itself is seen as a contingent, non-linear process that unfolds in a recursive dialogue with the past. In a bid to offer a more grounded approach to world literature, a key objective of this study is therefore to investigate the accumulation of temporalities in institutional histories of critical practice. To reach this objective, it engages the method of conceptual history as developed by Reinhart Koselleck and David Scott, demonstrating how the concept of ‘literature’ is resemanticised in ways that dialectically both challenge and consolidate literature as a concept and practice in post-colonised societies.

This book discusses salient moments of multilingual encounters and brings together contributions focused on the interplay between language use by individuals and societies, and language-related inequalities or opportunities for speakers. The chapters demonstrate how biographical and speaker-centred approaches can contribute to an understanding of linguistic diversity, how researchers can empirically account for lived experiences of languages, and how such accounts are embedded in a larger discussion on social (in)equality. Together the chapters make a powerful case for the importance of speaker-centred methodologies in multilingual and multilingualism research. The book is a rich source of theoretical and methodological reflections and will thus be a valuable resource for both experienced researchers and students beginning to explore biographical research methods.

Public deliberation, highly valued by many African societies, becomes the cornerstone of a new system of African political philosophy in this brilliant, highly original study. In Deliberative Agency, philosopher Uchenna Okeja offers a way to construct a new political center by building it around the ubiquitous African practice of public deliberation, a widely accepted means to resolve legal matters, reconcile feuding groups, and reestablish harmony. In cities, hometown associations and voluntary organizations carry out the task of fostering deliberation among African groups for different reasons. In some instances, the deliberation aims to settle disputes. In others, the aim is to decide the best action to take to address unfortunate incidents such as death. Through a measured, comparative analysis, Deliberative Agency argues that the best way to reimagine and harness the idea of public deliberation, based on current experiences in Africa, is to see it as performance of agency. Building a new political center around the practice places agency at the core of a new political life in Africa.