The chapter discusses the respective locations and “values” of Indigeneity and Blackness vis-à-vis whiteness and ethnoracial mixings in ideological constructions of national identity in two different Latin American historical periods: “monocultural mestizaje” and multiculturalism. After delving into the ideological foundations of monocultural mestizaje and “racial democracy,” the chapter considers the advent of what has been called “the Latin American multicultural turn,” which began emerging unevenly in the region in the late 1980s. The “turn” brought about new official narrations of the nation, in a move away from the “monocultural mestizaje” ideology of national identity that reifies the mestizo as the prototypical national identity, to instead nominally recognize and “embrace” national ethnoracial diversity in a wave of new constitutions and constitutional reforms. The chapter concludes that both racial hierarchy and the mestizaje ideology of national identity remain alive and well, as the colonial racial order has adapted to contemporary circumstances, including the ideological shift from monocultural mestizaje to multiculturalism.

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 is concerned with the question of what whiteness means today. Looking both at history and at Christian nationalism allows us to see that for much of its history, whiteness in the US meant respectable family values. European immigrants were promised the privilege of whiteness for the cost of assimilation, for leaving ethnic markers of clothing and language behind and assimilating into white cultural norms around family and gender roles. While today we tend to discuss respectability politics around people of color attempting to challenge racial stereotypes by practicing white middle-class norms, this discussion shows that Christian nationalism also functions to defend respectability in the form of sexual and familial norms. This commitment to defending respectability is a product of the history of US nationalism and perpetuates a politics of whiteness without ever needing to explicitly say so.

In this chapter, I detail the racial logics of the Anthropocene in its current discursive formation, focusing on three related critiques of the term. First, I show how the Anthropocene logic is derived from the categorization impulse of the geosciences, an epistemic push that has close ties to histories of racial science. A critical reading of geology has shown that the categorization of strata performs a similar pedagogy to the “family tree of man.” Second, this categorization is framed by the progressive narrative of modernity. In the Anthropocene, as an often apocalyptic narrative, the whiteness of historical time shows through and privileges a “colorblind” lens for the Anthropocene. Third, the objective description of the Anthropocene presents a universalizing narrative, one that has trouble detailing the differential experiences of environmental impacts. This universality reifies race into the oncoming environmental crisis even as it attempts to celebrate a world without divisions and differences. Finally, I draw from the critiques of the Anthropocene to highlight the multiple stories that are being told of the geophysical, ecological, and societal changes.

Issues of race and racism have been highly controversial in contemporary China. This chapter examines the significance of various events and the polemics they provoked around the politics of race and nationalism. Indeed, the controversy has to be appreciated in light of the rise of nationalistic feelings among Chinese netizens, who have insisted that the fashion world should no longer cater to Western aesthetics and should align with the aesthetics of Chinese people.

Enlightenment thought contributed to developing and reinforcing white supremacy in the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. While often celebrated as promoting universal liberty, Enlightenment scholarship was deeply intertwined with colonization and slavery, with many prominent thinkers either benefiting from or actively justifying human trafficking and racial hierarchies. Figures like Hans Sloane and John Locke developed new systems of human classification that departed from earlier Greek environmental theories, instead positing fixed racial categories with Europeans at the top. This early scientific racism provided justification for colonial exploitation while being funded by slavery-derived wealth. Additionally, emerging concepts of liberty and rights were explicitly limited to white men, with writers contrasting “freeborn” Englishmen to supposedly inferior races. These ideas culminated in new forms of race-based or “nation” states, exemplified by the USA, which formally enshrined white supremacy in law. While some contemporary voices criticized these developments, the profitable alliance between Enlightenment thought, colonialism, and slavery proved difficult to stop.

Chapter 5 examines how white supremacy manifested itself in different forms across English-speaking societies from roughly 1800 to 1865. It reveals a fundamental tension between claims of white people as uniquely freedom-loving and their role as colonizers and enslavers. The chapter explores how even self-styled “enlightened” whites often justified slavery and oppression through paternalistic arguments about racial “degradation” rather than explicit racial hatred. It details various strategies for removing nonwhites from white spaces, including deportation schemes, forced relocation, and cultural elimination through boarding schools. It highlights how violence against indigenous peoples in the USA, Australia, and Canada often culminated in genocide, while colonial authorities blamed such violence on “degraded whites” to justify further oppression. Throughout this period, white supremacy demonstrated remarkable adaptability, shifting between seemingly benevolent paternalism and outright elimination of nonwhite populations. Though the US Civil War ultimately established Black citizenship rights, white supremacy persisted by finding new ways to maintain racial hierarchies.

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.

Whiteness emerged gradually through specific historical developments rather than existing as a timeless concept. Evidence shows that ancient Romans and Greeks did not have our modern concept of race, instead viewing human differences through environmental and cultural lenses. Archaeological findings reveal that darker-skinned people lived throughout medieval Britain without systematic discrimination based on skin color. Several key historical developments contributed to later white supremacy: the Crusades’ creation of a European Christian identity, Spanish and Portuguese maritime expansion, early slave trading, and English colonization of Ireland. The latter served as a testing ground for colonial practices that were later applied globally. While pre-modern societies exhibited xenophobia and religious discrimination, these differed fundamentally from modern racial concepts, were not based on immutable biological characteristics, and could change through conversion or environmental adaptation. White supremacy emerged from these and other intersecting historical strands rather than having any single cause, challenging reductionist historical explanations.

The missionary encounter between Ireland and Africa is complex and evolving, withongoing reverberations in both societies. The Irish missionary movement in the earlytwentieth century echoed the discourse of British imperialism, and was part of theproject of establishing the Irish as ‘white’.  Irish literature complicates this narrative:missionaries in the work of Brian Friel, Mary Lavin, and John McGahern are figuresof ambivalence and isolation. Nigerian writers such as John Munonye and S. O.Mezu detail this intercultural contact from the African perspective.  The genesis ofcultural diplomacy and trade relationships between Ireland and Africa can be foundin these earlier missionary encounters. Irish NGOs are active in historical missionarylocations, replicating the discourse of the missionaries who came before them.Growing immigration and falling vocations has led to a reversal in the relationshipbetween the countries, whereby African priests come to Ireland to re-evangelize aChurch reeling from clerical abuse scandals.

From the medieval to the modern, King Arthur is habitually but not neccessarily associated with white male sovereignty authorised by violence against racially Othered peoples. Arthur is always raced but he is not essentially white. This chapter is interested in both the lacunae and the articulations of ‘race’ in Arthurian scholarship, and in what emerges when we pay attention to the racial Self as well as Others in medieval and modern Arthuriana. Situated in premodern critical race studies, and exploring African American Arthuriana in particular, the essay argues that paying attention to the embodiment of Arthur once again reveals the protean nature of race itself.

The chapter argues that the British gothic is not, as has been assumed, the beginning of the gothic as such, but a response to the local effects of transregional capitalist modernisation. The chapter observes that this history was not only financed by enslavement in the Atlantic world, it was accompanied by a pervasive and fundamentally destructive understanding of racial categories that British gothic writing negotiated. Exploring this entangled material and ideological history, the chapter first analyses late eighteen-century British gothic written at a time when the nation was flush with the spoils of enslavement in the Atlantic world. The chapter then discusses how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), conceived in the wake of slave-led revolution and uprisings in the Caribbean, abolition concerns, increased industrialisation and escalating industrial action, forges a racialised body around which notions of whiteness can take shape. In the final section, the chapter explores fin de siècle imperial gothic texts that testify to a New Imperialism by registering the increasingly anxious construction of racial identity that attended transregional capitalism at the time.

While early twentieth-century Western European and North American modernism has been characterized as a shock, its reverberations pulled the effects of the past variously in the wake of the new, depending on one’s circumstances in global modernity. This chapter discusses how, in that rupture/transition, the passages of Elizabeth Bowen, Pauline Smith, Dorothy Livesay, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys into and out of British imperial metropole London in the “Mother Country” (England), reveal their self-conscious adaptations of modernist technologies, undoing some imperial trappings and redoing prevailing imperial-patriarchal structures of value and status to which they claim membership. Each woman conveys the effects of empire–democracy, while struggling to retain belief in the liberal humanist subject/author captured in the figure of the “New Woman.” “Technology” refers to both the material infrastructure of modernity (mass reproduction, invention, and innovation) as well as “teks,” the fabric woven to convey the intangible but felt experiences of being in empire. The chapter unpacks the different implications of the gendered, racialized, and classed discourses of modernity in the nation-state – mastering, producing, doing – for these writers, who were positioned unequally to each other and who interpreted socialist, feminist, and anticolonialist movements differentially.

Mughal India had a long history of mistress–maid homoeroticism, ambiguously gendered domestic laborers, and slave–servant–concubine continuum. European men in India initially mimicked Mughal elites and maintained harems with Indian bibis (concubines). British colonialism in India, however, led to the domestic transition from bibis to memsahibs (white women). Chapter 1 situates the creation of a new desexualized colonial caregiver, the ayah, in the growing British shame about interracial sex, concubinage, domestic slavery, and mixed-race children from the 1780s. The ayah, Chapter 1 argues, distinguished the respectable, racially pure British imperial home from hypersexualized Mughal households and from mixed-race slave-holding European Catholic households. The brown ayah was crucial for the production and reproduction of British imperial whiteness at a time of heightened racial and sexual anxiety. The desexualized racialized ayah thus erased the embarrassing prevalence of sexual and reproductive labors provided by South Asian women to British men. The final section of this chapter explores the lived experiences of colonial ayahs as they upheld the racial and sexual hierarchies of the British Empire.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the concepts of the American nightmare and Whiteness as property, supremacy, and violence. It begins with the case of Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels, two Black brothers from North Carolina who lost their land in 2011 but refused to leave it. Black involuntary land loss is important for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the US because it is a major driver of racial wealth inequities. This can be explained, in part, by Whiteness, a system built on antiblackness and anti-Indianism that creates and is created to put White people at the top of the US racial hierarchy through legal, cultural, and material means, such as property. This chapter examines some key facts about Black Americans, the meaning of the American nightmare, the defining features and popular myths about Whiteness, and how it was invented, and is justified, and defended. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on Black prosperity and White riots. It ends with a discussion of two equities for reclaiming the American Dream.