Scott’s struggles to maintain authorial control against the incursions of Merrilies’s witchlike powers compels him to consciously assume the more distanced role of an antiquarian collecting stories of female enthusiasm in subsequent novels, offering up prognoses of mental instability for the witches in The Antiquary, The Pirate and Ivanhoe. This chapter also introduces an entirely new and different witch figure: Rebecca, a lovely young Jewish healer whose potential marriage to Ivanhoe is challenged by racial prejudice and misogynistic suspicions that brand her as a witch. Although Rebecca is rescued from her trial as a witch, she does not receive the happy ending she deserves. Scott writes her out of the narrative in the end when she and her father decide to leave England. Yet Ivanhoe’s choice of a bride – the mild and dutiful Rowena – pales by comparison to Rebecca, inviting readers to envision an alternative ending: the union of Rebecca and Ivanhoe, and the socially transformative potential of this marriage between a Christian and a Jew, the story’s hero, and a purported witch.

This chapter foregrounds recent studies on race and religion as analytic categories in the study of the ancient world. Conventional scholarly analysis of the late-antique Mediterranean world often assumes that uses of the terms race and racism are anachronistic in studies of premodern societies. By contrast, religion is often taken for granted as an unproblematic category of analysis across both modern and premodern social contexts. More recently, critical studies of race and religion have illustrated the shortcomings in the basic assumptions that undergird the uses and disuses of terms like race, racism, religion, and ethnicity in studies of premodernity. Drawing on these recent works, this chapter demonstrates the entanglements between religious and racialised conceptions of group identities and hierarchies. Race and religion are conceptually intertwined to the extent that religious ideas have been instrumental in processes of racialisation and religious groups have been targets of racialisation. The chapter concludes with examples of how theories of environmental determinism and anti-Semitism manifest in Christian ideologies and imperial policies in late antiquity.

Like Europeans all over the Global South, settlers and administrators in East Africa used the concept of race as a weapon to oppress, elevating themselves and for decades enjoying the luxury of immunity from having their “race” used against them. However, in the context of post-independence, whites came under an uncomfortable spotlight as many Kenyans of African descent questioned their entitlement to belong to the nation in light of their enduring and extreme privilege. The typification of whiteness in the Kenyan discourses traced here thus emerges as a backlash against a history of colonial theft and frames whites as outsiders, conspicuously Other. Time is folded and flattened in these formulations; even whites born long after independence, or who bought their land from Africans, become “white settlers” or “land-grabbers,” and decidedly not “Kenyan.”

This chapter argues that the origins of the Capitalocene, which locates the roots of planetary crisis in capitalistic accumulation and exploitation, can be found in the nineteenth century. The Victorian period not only witnessed the rise of fossil-fueled modernity – an acceleration of global industrialization fueled by coal and colonialism – but also produced searing critiques of capitalism in some of its most enduring literature. Central to my analysis is Olive Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), a fictional admonition of Cecil Rhodes and his British South African Company. This chapter reads Trooper Peter alongside The Story of an African Farm (1883) and From Man to Man (1926) to illuminate Schreiner’s critique of colonial capitalism and Rhodes’s expansionism. Schreiner rebukes capitalism’s frontier process and challenges hierarchical constructions of nature and humanity, exposing capitalism’s normalization of racial and sexual exploitation, while also imagining alternative modes of more-than-human solidarity.

This chapter strives to provide an account of what I call the Boasian intervention on race and racism that both acknowledges its importance and innovations as a (liberal) anti-racist project and critically highlights contradictory aspects of that project, particularly with regard to its analysis and representation of racism and whiteness in the United States. The first part summarizes how Franz Boas and his students contested discourses of biological determinism and scientific racism via transformations in discourses of race and culture. The second, more extensive, part focuses largely on selected works of Boas and Ruth Benedict and critically examines how their reinvention of race and representations of “race problems” in the US had different implications for European immigrants, who could become absorbed into the whiteness of American identity, and people of color, who could not.

This chapter focuses on blackface in Argentina, and on the larger implications embedded within the practice in that specific nation. The particularities of its use in the Argentine context are significant because of the country’s powerful nation-building mythology, which holds there are no Black people in the nation. Numerous scholarly investigations have demonstrated the consistent and sustained presence of Africans and Afrodescendants throughout the country’s history.

Our starting point in this book is that across the globe, race – and its articulations with other forms of identification, ideology, and practice – remains one of the key conceptual tools to secure sociopolitical dominance, develop cultural politics of resistance, and engage in self-identification. Yet race opens up a major field of contradiction and misunderstanding. On the one hand, the ideas and practices of race that emerged with European expansion and colonization have impacted all modern societies – even as we should be sensitive to the particularity of histories and experiences in different places. On the other hand, the general accepted view is that there is no such thing as biological race; race is socially constructed, and its meanings are created for sociopolitical ends. Along with many others, we take the view that, while biological race is not “real,” “folk” ideas about it continue to proliferate as if race were natural, shaping sociopolitical relations and cultural practices.

In this chapter I argue that Cuba and Puerto Rico embraced racial projects based on the myth of a “racial democracy” that idealized the harmonious integration of whites, Blacks, and Mulattoes to combat colonialism and promote nationalism under Spanish and US hegemony. However, I propose that the ideology of white supremacy, rooted in colonial slavery, continues to prevail in contemporary Cuba and Puerto Rico – despite the numerous contrasts between the two countries. This renders the assertion of Blackness problematic and precarious in both places. Effacing Blackness as an integral part of national identity has been a recurrent theme in the colonial and postcolonial histories of Cuba and Puerto Rico, together with the privileging of whiteness.

The book opens with an overview of the tensions that increasingly define hip-hop’s role in contemporary culture, namely the way that the music continually shifts between complicity and critique in its assessment of capitalism and racialized inequality. This ambivalence is related back to the currents of pleasure and pain that run through the work of such rappers as Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion, and to the usage of hip-hop in a recent film soundtrack. After briefly discussing the editor’s own position in relation to the culture, the introduction moves on to an overview of the collection’s general aims. These include the attempt to reflect both the diverse styles and regions of contemporary hip-hop, and the political commitments of the contributors. A short discussion of editorial conventions follows, as well as an account of the book’s approach to hate speech. The section ends with a brief overview of each of the nineteen chapters.

This chapter explains how white supremacy evolved and adapted after the US Civil War and the abolition of slavery across the British Empire. Rather than weakening, white power structures found new ways to maintain racial hierarchies through scientific racism, Social Darwinism, and eugenics. These scientific frameworks provided intellectual justification for continued oppression while appearing objective and dispassionate. The period saw the rise of immigration restrictions, voter suppression, and systematic segregation across English-speaking societies, all designed to preserve white political and economic power. New “race perils” reflected white anxieties about demographic change, while eugenics aimed to protect racial “purity” through sterilization programs and anti-miscegenation laws. Particularly significant was the denial of capital accumulation to nonwhites through housing discrimination, job discrimination, and business restrictions. Although many voices challenged these racist theories and practices as false and cynical, they were consistently overpowered by institutional forces desperate to maintain white supremacy.

The introduction begins a comprehensive examination of white supremacy, defining it as both a system of racial dominance and the ideology that justifies it. It emphasizes that white supremacy manifests itself not only through overt racism but also through inaction, false inclusion, and seemingly benevolent actions. The introduction explains the book’s focus on the English-speaking world, citing the British Empire’s role as the largest force in creating and maintaining white supremacy globally. While acknowledging that other empires developed their own forms of white supremacy, it argues that the British case is distinctive because of its scale of human trafficking and settler colonialism. The text stresses that white supremacy is neither inevitable nor natural, but is historically constructed, and therefore can be dismantled, despite powerful forces maintaining it.

Of all the ways humans have chosen to divide themselves, none has a history as problematic as race. This concept has significant implications for almost every aspect of contemporary human conduct, irrespective of what ‘race’ we identify with, or even are deemed to belong to. This is particularly so for the field of education. This chapter looks at the complicated history of race as well as some of the current challenges that exist. In order to describe the complex issues within this important area, a wide range of interrelated terms are used. Probably the most important is the underpinning notion of ‘othering’; that is, thinking about a certain person or group as not ‘one of us’, as the ‘other’.

Humans are born helpless and require others to nurture and care for them for a lengthy period. This requires paid parental leave policies, which the US, almost uniquely, doesn’t have, thereby compromising our health. During our forager-hunter era, vigilant sharing took place. The advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago led to a decline in health as exploitation began. This reversed only in the last few hundred years due to advances in sanitation, standard of living, and basic medical care. Population health is much more than adding up factors affecting individual health, with political context and governance being the most significant factors. Income inequality impacts health in three realms. Health promotion requires action by policy makers and national leaders. Women live longer than men. Geography matters, with a wide range of health outcomes across US counties. Culture and racism have strong impacts. Diets are less important. Physical and chemical environmental hazards impact health outcomes, mostly to a lesser degree