“Victorian studies” and “decolonization” have a unique historical relation. Though the recent discourse of “decolonization” has gained unprecedented traction in Victorian studies, there is a much older relation between these two domains. For the “Victorian” itself became available as a coherent object of study and was institutionalized as an area studies field in the heyday of Third Worldist liberation and the age of decolonization – the 1950s and 60s. A field notorious for its ignorance of questions of race and empire, Victorian studies came to be in the postwar period amidst an efflorescence of area studies fields in the United States. But as should be common knowledge by now, this period in the West, and the formation of area studies fields, did not develop in isolation from the colonial peripheries. This is evinced by the fact that writers from the periphery not only make frequent mention of the Victorians but also rely on them for making the postcolonial legible. Citations to Victorian writers, of course, abound in postcolonial writing. But rather than focus on the familiar instances in which the “empire writes back” (Rhys’s Jamaica, Achebe’s excoriation of Conrad, Guerrillas’ Thrushcross Grange, and daffodils in Lucy), this chapter considers those encounters with Victorian culture and society that seek to formulate the politics of decolonization.

This chapter focusses on legal pluralism and restorative justice in Colombia since 2016. It is a period defined by the agreement reached between the Colombian Government and the most important guerrilla group (FARC), namely the La Habana Agreements which brought to an end a period of political violence that had lasted for more than fifty years. The law of ethnic peoples is one of the forms of collective organisation through which subalternized communities have sought to strengthen their identities, languages, territories, legal systems, and authorities in order to resist old and new colonialisms. The intercultural framework for transitional justice seeks to formulate a concept of justice that responds to the need to heal the wounds associated with past wrongdoings and counteract contemporary forms of injustice directed against various ethnically differentiated victims. Intercultural dialogue must be based on the capacity to listen in such a way as to understand and grant full credibility to the ways in which the silenced voices are intended to be heard. The role of transitional justice is a catalyst in the search for strategies to combat systematic human rights abuses and violations, due to the ravages of historical and existing colonialism. The limitations of JEP (Special Jurisdiction for Peace) may be a factor that prevents it from fully complying with its historical mission, especially if this is compounded by a lack of political will, both on the part of the government in power and the more conservative and extremist sectors of Colombian society.

The 1980s saw a shift in Black women’s literary production on and about Jamaica and its transnational relationship to the United States and Canada in particular. While these texts are largely set in Jamaica, they received acclaim among an international audience. This chapter offers a dialogue between dramaturgical reading and the Jamaican concept of ruination, evaluating how adopting the form of play text and dramatic writing aids in the creation of Black feminist writing on Jamaica’s place in the transnational imagination in North America. By mirroring both play text and production, a form that is always under the threat of temporal evaporation and erasure at the end of performance, a dramaturgical reading of these texts will evaluate how dramaturgical methods also serve as an apt analogy for the workings of ruination (something that is at once so fecund and rich that it resists all attempts at the imposition of permanence).

The Introduction explores the origins and growth of the Caribbean anarchist network on the backs of US imperial expansion after 1898. Anarchist migration around the Caribbean, the creation and distribution of anarchist cultural productions, and the key production and distribution of the anarchist press (especially out of Havana) enabled anarchists to forge and maintain a network with its hub in Havana that radiated to New York, Tampa, Mexico, Los Angeles, Panama, the Canal Zone, and Puerto Rico.