The conversation draws on two texts by members of the art collective Identidad Marrón, which both explore how racialised subalterns can decolonise the art world and specifically museums. The first is a statement by visual artist Abril Caríssimo; the second is a text by Flora Alvarado y América López, titled ‘Malonear los museos’, reflecting on their experience of curating an exhibition titled Qué necesitan aprender los museos? (What Do Museums Need to Learn?) for the public Palais de Glace museum, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

This chapter considers three interrelated genres of political writing that have been particularly prominent since 1900. These are memoirs, diaries, and biographies. Three of these genres have received some degree of treatment in previous scholarship, with memoirs having received the highest level of systematic discussion. There has been considerable attention paid to how specific books have helped shape the reputations of their authors/subjects. This has been related to questions of official secrecy and control over documents. But there is scope to investigate how these genres have developed over time and how they have been mutually interconnected. The chapter addresses the question of why these three types of work have become an accepted and largely unquestioned, part of the British political and publishing landscape. It investigates the impact that this dominance has had on how British politics has been conceived and understood. At the surface level, it seems quite understandable that prime ministers, cabinet ministers, and a number of relatively colourful junior ministers, advisers, and backbench MPs should have dominated the publishing landscape. But at the same time, the dominance of Westminster in the priorities of publishers reinforces a particular elitist, London-centric, and largely white male-centric view of what politics is about.

The rise of right-wing populism has provoked a variety of responses. This chapter engages with one such response: Chantal Mouffe’s ‘left populism’. Mouffe’s call for an anti-essentialist, agonistic politics that can shift away from the ‘common sense’ of neoliberalism and reactionary nationalism which underpins right-wing populism is welcome. And yet our concern is that it risks being trapped by its reification of the nation-state. It may also miss the international dimensions of right-wing populism, including how forms of relation between states and corporations figure in its rise and stabilisation. We explore an approach which does not locate politics primarily as a fight over control of the identity and institutions of the state, but which begins in transnational resistance and collective action. We take up Featherstone’s account of transnational solidarity to frame a study of resistance to the Adani conglomerate. In our argument, this can be understood as an example of collective action not reliant on pre-existing (national) identities. Drawing on Featherstone’s account of solidarity as a lens invites us to consider whether transnational practices which decentre the state may offer resources to tackle the international aspects of populism’s rise, and the company-state nexus central to right-wing populism.

Chapter 3 shows how older men, established patriarchs, wrestle with the temptation to sell their land and live lives of ‘fun’, abandoning their obligations to pass on wealth to future generations. Speaking to a rich regional literature on fatherhood and provider masculinity, it unveils a local politics of masculine responsibility, focusing on the question of land sale and fatherly obligation. Adult men from the Ituura neighbourhood who work for wages in the informal economy to support their families are shown to condemn other ‘bad’ men who sell their family land to live ‘comfortable’ lives of short-term consumption. The discourses of self-styled moral men valorise their self-disciplined control of a desire to consume wealth against the grain of immorality they perceive in the neighbourhood and beyond, especially by retaining their ancestral land. Complicating these heroic narratives of economic striving, the chapter explores the life circumstances that force land sale, as well as a growing cynicism amongst working-aged men towards the obligations of patrilineal kinship.

In this chapter, I consider how transparency and gold are established and maintained as “global values” and how actors differently positioned within gold markets seek to align them, with greater and lesser degrees of success. I trace how this happens in three clusters of transparency projects: certification schemes and voluntary frameworks for mining companies; efforts to use blockchain technologies to increase transparency in the supply chain; and efforts to verify (and perform the verification of) gold’s presence in European central banks, especially the Deutsche Bundesbank. Exploring these specific sites where transparency and gold convene, both supporting and tugging against each other, allows us to consider transparency from a different angle than is found in many other discussions, viewing gold and transparency as engaged in competitive processes of value-making (and unmaking).