This chapter considers Percy Shelley’s multifaceted depictions in modern popular culture as indicative of his ever-evolving reception in mainstream popular culture: he is simultaneously a rebel and an aesthete, a revolutionary and a fop, an ultra-canonical poet and a countercultural icon. Appearances of Shelley’s works – and depictions of the poet himself – in such popular media as television, film, comic books, graphic novels, contemporary fiction, pop music, and even international events like the Olympic closing ceremonies speak both to Shelley’s continued cultural relevance and to the variety of ways in which that relevance has evolved in the two centuries since his lifetime.

The twentieth-century quest for individual freedom was pursued not merely in Europe proper but also at its boundaries. This had much to do, in the first instance, with a desire for liberation from metropolitan societies that many identified with an excess of constraints and conventions. It also reflected a strong sense of European superiority over both Americans and colonized peoples. But, as the century wore on, uncertainties arose from the growing power of the United States and the increasing criticism and various reforms to which colonial rule was subject. American popular culture appealed to youth across the continent, to the dismay of many adults, while colonized subjects increasingly claimed the status of free individuals, both in overseas colonies and as immigrants to Europe. This chapter discusses whether there was autonomy or conformism in America, at a time when its supposed freedoms were so attractive to many Europeans though they appalled others; how colonial self-reliance was loudly claimed and staunchly defended against indigenous demands and more liberal forms of European rule; and, finally, what colonized subjects’ perspectives were on the individual freedom they were denied but were seeking as part of their efforts to become decolonized.

The wheels came off the Japanese economy in the early 1990s, throwing into question the expos that had emerged from and contributed to the previous two decades of growth. The first casualty was the Tokyo World City Expo, planned in the late 1980s and cancelled in 1995. By the end of the decade, there was a wave of nostalgia for Expo 70, as middle-aged creatives mourned the betrayal of its promises, or bemoaned its continuing hold on the present. But expos continued to have their uses. Alongside the laments, this chapter explores how the national bureaucracy and local authorities continued to use a new system and new kinds of expos to coordinate and foster development in the regions. It argues that the complicated genesis and unexpected success of Expo 2005 in Aichi, which evolved from a spur for regional development to the first eco-expo recognized by the United Nations, shows how expos remain a tool in the armory of development, even if observers in the West and intellectuals in Japan think their time has passed.

By the 1720s, the city born of shogunal vision and warrior needs pulsed with townspeople, the artists and merchants of commoner status who began to rival samurai in number among the residents of Edo. With a staggering one million people calling Edo home, the shogun’s capital also became the city of Edoites through a dance of shogunate authority, samurai prestige, and commoner interests. Destructive fires were occasions for such negotiations, and their frequency left a deep imprint on the physical landscape and culture of the city. Kabuki theater too was a site of political push and pull, as well as rambunctious amusement for both townspeople and samurai partaking in the flourishing urban popular culture of the world’s largest city.

In the early 2000s, the idea of Japan as culturally “cool” captured imaginations. Propelled by a government interested in marketing and selling Japan, products from video games to anime and manga were repackaged as embodying cultural cool. And global audiences were reminded that what they enjoyed consuming, from sushi to Pokémon, were of Japanese origin. The capital of Tokyo, now virtually synonymous with the nation as a whole, was to epitomize this “cool Japan” with its technological sophistication, sleek aesthetics, and cultural creativity as host of the 2020 Olympic Games. Despite disruption by the COVID-19 pandemic, what the games reflected vividly was how the Tokyo metropolitan region, tracing a general trend that dated back centuries, had grown almost inexorably in size and in political, economic, and cultural gravity. Not just in historical patterns but in so many ways – from a city center that remains inviolate to the spiral that radiates outward, from the low-rise wooden buildings in the low city to the names of neighborhoods – the past remains deeply woven into the richly textured pastiche of contemporary Tokyo.

Chapter 6 examines the reconstruction of Rwanda’s music scene after the genocide. It considers how it opened up new possibilities for young urban Rwandans to transform their hearts and imagine new visions for themselves. Although young artists seemed to share an understanding that song could communicate ‘messages’ (abatumwa) not available in other modes of speech, they also understood there were limits to this. Far from being a space of ‘freedom’ or the ‘unofficial’, the local music scene was shot through with politics. Young artists were keenly aware that the power dynamics that shaped wider post-genocide social life equally shaped the kinds of music they were and were not allowed to make.

Chapter 8 focuses on the popular musical competition Primus Guma Guma Super Star. It pays particular attention to local debates about the merits of both ‘playback’ – i.e. lip-synched – and ‘live’ performance, and what they reveal about the wider relationship between the state and Rwandan youth. The chapter argues that the competition attempted to create a post-genocide celebrity subject who was required to ‘playback’ government ideology through both words and actions. However, audiences were not satisfied with these playback performances and insisted instead that popular artists should be able to perform live. These debates indexed wider anxieties about young people’s ability to access global networks – perceived to be the way to wealth and success – and called into question who was and who was not included in the government’s development vision.

This chapter examines the popularity of Kinyarwanda-language rap and hip hop in urban Rwanda. It considers how it can be understood as a genre both of anger and sorrow, revealing Kigali as a site not of progress and modernity but rather of poverty and deception. The genre’s use and invention of Kinyarwanda slang is considered, as well as its politics. The chapter argues that a simple resistance–domination binary is unhelpful for truly understanding hip hop’s local complexities. Instead, it takes into account the carefully guarded silences that hip hop artists maintained, and the ways in which the performance of swaga was less available to young women than to young men.

The Conclusion returns to the case of Kizito Mihigo and his tragic death in February 2020. It considers how his music reveals a certain politics of humanity, and the ways in which the RPF state tries to define who is and is not to be considered human. Returning to the theme of sound, noise, and silence, it sugggests the importance of taking sound seriously in Rwanda. Thinking more closely about sound – not only its discursive properities but its material ones as well – opens up new avenues for scholarship.

The growing field of legal design has largely adopted a design-thinking approach. Whilst this has improved efficiency and usability within legal systems, it has insufficiently addressed its systemic issues and in some cases has further entrenched such issues. Critical Design opposes the affirmative approach of design-thinking; it uses design as a method for finding and expanding problems rather than solving them quickly and discreetly. A Critical Design perspective applied to legal issues has the potential to more fundamentally interrogate systemic legal issues, which is necessary for creating a fairer legal system. The project James v Birnmann illustrates the capacity for Critical Design to contend with legal issues. Through utilising popular aesthetics and media, James v Birnmann engages the public with the negative impacts of the growing mediatisation of courtroom trials and the use of AI within legal processes. Challenging the public’s perception of law in this way is a useful step towards legal reform in-unto-itself, whilst this problem-finding approach could also work alongside and enrich the more solution-driven legal design as it is currently practised.

Even though the word has been around for over one thousand years, bitch has proven that an old dog can be taught new tricks. Over the centuries, bitch has become a linguistic chameleon with many different meanings and uses. Bitch has become a shape-shifter too, morphing into modern slang spellings like biatch, biznatch, and betch. Bitch is a versatile word. It can behave like a noun, an adjective, a verb, or an interjection, while it also makes a cameo appearance in lots of idioms. Bitch can be a bitch of a word. Calling someone a bitch once seemed to be a pretty straightforward insult, but today – after so many variations, reinventions, and attempts to reclaim the word – it’s not always clear what bitch really means. Nowadays, the word appears in numerous other languages too, from Arabic and Japanese to Spanish and Zulu. This chapter takes a look at bitch in the present day, and beyond.

Smith’s chapter focuses on the continued influence of the idea of Weimar Berlin in contemporary popular culture. The chapter takes as its starting point recent cultural expressions, such as the television series Babylon Berlin, focusing on previously unexplored aspects of how Weimar is depicted as a modern Babylon. Smith identifies two particularly salient aspects in these depictions: first, that the portrait of right-wing political cultures within Weimar are given more depth and nuance than are afforded center-left and left-wing ones; and, second, how the depiction of sex and violence leads us back to Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and its apocalyptic vision of Weimar, along with Anglo-American visions of Weimar that have particularly long staying power, in particular Christopher Isherwood’s depiction of 1930s Berlin and its iterations and adaptations on stage and screen. The chapter demonstrates the ways in which Weimar retains its grip on aspects of our contemporary popular culture and how the particular forms these cultural expressions take may tell us about the lessons drawn from Weimar.

This chapter makes a case for the importance of the 1830s in the history of the British novel. Although unmarked by the publication of novels that enjoyed the longevity of fiction published in the decades before and after, this decade produced a conjunction that was to have a major impact on the future development of the novel form: the emergence, on the one hand, of the young Charles Dickens as a talented new writer and, on the other, of London as a major subject of (predominantly visual) representation. This conjunction, the chapter argues, was to produce a new branch, in Franco Moretti’s sense, on the tree of the British novel. Specifically, the chapter shows how Dickens’s earliest work, Sketches by Boz, already fabricates, in terms of characterisation and its organisation of the social spaces that could potentially underlie plot relations, a London-driven urban aesthetic that would differ from the principles of what, by the 1860s, became consecrated as the canonical British novel.