In Chapter 8, we use an experiment which presents a large sample of Black and White respondents with a press release from a hypothetical politician. The press release differs by whether it discusses a non-racial liberal issue (climate change), a high-profile racial issue (police reform), and a low-profile racial issue (manufacturing employment discrimination). We also vary the race of the hypothetical politician. The results demonstrate that racial rhetorical representation improves perceptions of both Black and White politicians among African Americans. However, White elected officials benefit most from speaking about lower profile racial issues. This demonstrates that the form of racial outreach that White elected officials are the least likely to engage in may help them the most with Black people. Qualitative responses reveal that Black respondents perceive more policy congruence, empathy, and trust in Black elected officials when they engage in both forms of racial rhetorical representation. However, Black respondents are much more trusting of White politicians to follow through their rhetoric with action when it is tied to a low-profile racial issue.

Based on conversations between the authors, two of them directors of theatre companies, one Afro and the other Mapuche, in Argentina, we examine the construction of theatrical poetics, which question colonial criteria of creativity and build alternative spaces for drama production in Argentina. We discuss the development of anti-racist staging practices, which go beyond recognition politics, centring the stage as a point of reconnection of subalternised social trajectories and presenting the lives of Mapuches and Afro-descendants in all their complexity. We focus on four axes: a) theatrical poetics as a way to move and generate community via affective interventions; b) theatre as a method of research into Afro and Mapuche histories and lives in their multiplicity and which can generate dramaturgies that challenge ideologies of a European nation; c) procedures that seek to decolonise the bodies of actresses and audiences, using gestures and embodied memories, and to challenge stereotypes about racialised women; and d) a reconceptualisation of the notion of body-territory to analyse how, using the stage, forms of life are reconstructed in all their heterogeneity. Both companies challenge the project of a white-colonial Argentina and bring politics to art.

Chapter 7 describes the fortunes of Mwaura three years on from the original fieldwork. It draws attention to heightened anxieties about social breakdown illuminated by the author’s host family’s own breaking apart, and two deaths – one of a neighbourhood youth, and another of a neighbourhood elder, the same young man’s father. This ethnographic epilogue crystallises key issues brought out throughout the book: male struggles with alcoholism, anxieties about downward social mobility, the damaging effects of family breakdown, and contestation over landed futures.

Using the case of the exhibition Véxoa: Nós Sabemos, the first Indigenous-only arts exhibition at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2020–2021), we explore the deconstruction of the coloniality of a visual culture based on stereotypes of Indigenous peoples; self-representation as a strategy to combat the invisibilisation of Indigenous authorship in Brazil; and Indigenous arts as affective interventions that amplify the struggle for Indigenous rights. We show how contemporary Indigenous arts in Brazil are unsettling categories persistently associated with native aesthetics, and enacting anti-racism by challenging the dominant culture’s appropriation and exploitation of Indigenous cultures. In Véxoa, objects perceived as artifacts or crafts by hegemonic visual cultures are recontextualised as works of art, empowering Indigenous artists in symbolic, political and economic terms. Indigenous artists can disrupt the power dynamics that perpetuate racism, demonstrating that, in order to confront colonial and extractive practices that have historically marginalised Indigenous peoples, it is important for museums to establish collaborative relationships with Indigenous artists and community members in the curatorial process.

The Epilogue discusses how the narrative and arguments of the book can help us revisit the debates in Ottoman intellectual historiography over the concept of order (nizam), underlining how labor history and class perspectives can expand the scope of questions and offer new agendas for Ottoman and global histories of the modern era. It offers a conceptual discussion of reform, and highlights the distinctive characteristics of Ottoman Reform in the long nineteenth century, by focusing on its connections with modern capitalism. It emphasizes the capitalist characteristic of the order which the reformist elites struggled to institute throughout the nineteenth century. It underlines how focusing on a specific worksite, and, in particular, studying relations of production within an Ottoman military-industrial site, could help us to reveal these capitalist patterns and class dynamics in Ottoman reform processes. It points to the necessity of the dialogue between labor/social history and intellectual history to better understand how these capitalist practices shaped or were shaped by the mentalities and ideas of Ottoman state elites during this period.

Xi Jinping’s drive for power has destabilized elite political consensus and dismantled power-sharing norms that evolved since the 1980s. By removing de jure term limits on the office of the presidency – and thus far refusing to nominate his successor for this and his other leadership positions – Xi has solidified his own authority at the expense of the regular and peaceful transfer of power. In doing so, he has pushed China towards a potential destabilizing succession crisis. This chapter assesses China’s possible leadership succession scenarios in the coming years. Is Xi akin to Stalin after the purges of the 1930s – a leader who has so thoroughly eliminated rivals and cowed the system that he will remain in power until he can no longer perform the duties of office, leaving a succession battle in his wake? Or will the system produce a reaction against his all-encompassing power, either forcing him out of office prematurely or at least pushing him to set a timetable for his departure? Alternatively, what are Xi’s options for presiding over an orderly succession in the next 5 to 10 years? Solving the succession problem will be critical for the party’s future survival.

This chapter discusses the contested place of the Declaration of Independence in black political thought. As a document that provided a rationale for American independence, the Declaration of Independence in its own way also provided one for black political equality in the United States. This tension between intention and interpretation has made the Declaration stubbornly immune from attack by black intellectuals, politicians, and movement leaders. With rare exception, the Declaration has been attacked mostly for its exclusivity, not its content or core ethos. Even Critical Race Theory’s (CRT) modest dissent from the Declaration has been limited in its ability to transform the persistence of black support for it, making arguments for CRT’s abandonment of America’s founding principles ring hollow. Instead, the history of black political thought from Frederick Douglass to W. E. B. Du Bois to Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, stands squarely on the side of the Declaration’s essential truths, while admonishing America’s enduring failure to live up to them.