This chapter uses the work of Toni Morrison, especially Song of Solomon, to explore the racialised history of finance in America. The first section suggests that the two intertextual reference points for this novel, William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, provide a telling history of those key moments in America – the 1870s, the 1930s and the 1960s – in which credit has been associated with false promise and dispossession for the African Americans. Its second section uses this context to trace the narrative of the protagonist of Song of Solomon, Milkman Dead, as he uncovers the loss that has constructed his own family history. Morrison traces this racialised history of finance, especially the self-ownership promised by insurance, to explore the particular and paradoxical crisis in the credit cultures of the 1970s. The novel reads the politics of the contemporary by returning to the old failures of both the New South and the New Deal and reckons with the persistent and still-present legacies of a credit system that was rooted in the trade in humans.

Are local politics usually characterized by disagreement or consensus? While scholars of politics in major cities such as New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles have long emphasized the centrality of racial and class cleavages in elections and governing, the conventional wisdom is that local politics outside such urban behemoths – that is, in the thousands of smaller cities and towns where nearly 3 in 4 Americans live – are relatively staid. According to this view, local politics are distinctive from national or state politics because they typically revolve around relatively low-stakes issues and rely on elected officials who are characterized more by managerial acumen than ideological fervor. These characteristics, the argument goes, make local politics relatively placid in comparison with the pitched battles that frequently roil national politics.

Chapter 2 introduces the topic of foreclosure, and includes discussion of the theoretical frameworks and principles that can inform deeper consideration of the foreclosure issues of the past decade and going forward. The chapter examines the differential impact of race among U.S. consumers. It offers interviews with individuals who are currently fighting foreclosure and their lawyers. Our investigation traces the specificity of the discriminatory targeting of black Americans for predatory schemes. The chapter also includes a framing discussion with respect to the mortgage-backed securities market, market practice and regulatory oversight at the commencement of the global financial crisis. We examine the huge gap between what regulators believed was occurring and the practice of mortgage lending on the ground. We explore the deeper connection between market design and its consequent incentives for self-dealing as primary drivers of continuing harmful conduct in financial markets. Our objective in this chapter is to give readers that may have only passing familiarity with critical race theory or financial market theory a solid context in which to read the rest of the book.

Houston, Texas is a city of roughly 2.3 million people, located in the southeastern portion of the state, near Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. It has a dynamic economy, with two dozen Fortune 500 companies, the nation’s second-most-active port, and significant energy, technology, aerospace, medical, and manufacturing sectors. Although the city has a white-plurality population (37.3 percent of residents identify as white), it is very racially diverse, with 36.5 percent of residents identifying as Hispanic/Latino; 16.6 percent identifying as African American; 7.5 percent identifying as Asian; and 2 percent identifying as “Other.” Compared with many cities of similar size, Houston boasts an attractive combination of abundant jobs, affordable housing, and exciting cultural amenities.

We conclude by arguing that White animus toward Latinos can no longer be ignored. The policy implications violent the rights of both Latinos as well as undermine the very foundation of democratic government. The future of Latinos living in the United States is largely dependent on how citizens and political institutions deal with this widespread and influential animus toward Latinos. We suggest that that this animus will most likely be a persistent presence in US politics, but can be muted when policy agendas shift and the electoral benefits of campaigning toward those who harbor this animus subside.

Chapter 5 examines urban beautification efforts, welfare associations, liberal clubs, and staged state theater (e.g., the Minerva festivals) during Manuel Estrada Cabrera’s dictatorship (1898–1920). If state sovereignty was circumscribed by the coffee planters’ efforts in the countryside, in the city of Cobán, Estrada Cabrera responded to popular demands for access to civilization by staging elaborate festivals that provided all Guatemalans access to Western civilization and learning. The ladino nationalism that flourished under Estrada Cabrera blurred racial boundaries and held up the ladino artisan as the ideal national subject. A series of national and global events – earthquakes, World War I, the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, and the 1919 influenza pandemic – upended these efforts and transformed the Minerva festivals from symbols of national inclusion and modern belonging into symbols of the corruption and political discontent that erupted in 1920 with the overthrow of Estrada Cabrera.

The 1898 crisis enabled the rapid growth of German-owned plantations and fincas de mozos, where German planters carved out a partial sovereignty that included a judicial system, the appointment of representatives of state authorities, and a combination of violence and patriarchal affection. Q’eqchi’s expressed their interpretation of this new economy through the figure of El Q’eq, a half-man, half-cow, produced from the sexual union between a German coffee planter and a cow. As a hypersexualized beast charged with protecting German plantations and ensuring order, El Q’eq also revealed the territorial limits of Guatemalan state sovereignty and unsettled claims of a linear march toward a liberal nation-state. El Q’eq was also a reflection of plantation discipline, the sexual economy of plantation life, and the perversion of Q’eqchi’ morals and social norms in racial capitalism.

In 1886, a frost unleashed by the region’s most powerful mountain deity, Tzuultaq’a Xucaneb, to seek revenge for coffee production and private property set off a millennial revolt. In the wake of this moral and spiritual crisis, Q’eqchi’s searched for new intermediaries and forged cross-racial alliances. In the wake of the frost, some rural Q’eqchi’s expressed another time, deeply inflected by the belief that mountain spirits were themselves historical agents. Others opened a national debate over the place of “slavery” in a modernizing nation in alliance with ladino indigenistas. Despite the temporary abolition of coerced labor, however, a political and economic crisis in 1897 drove the return to coerced labor and set the stage for a new plantation economy.

The conclusion illustrates the uneven and nonlinear nature of Guatemalan nation-state expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also highlights the important role played by Q’eqchi’ patriarchs, the legacies of colonialism, and the centrality of race and time to political struggles. The Conclusion also illustrates how the historical debris of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century histories shaped Guatemala’s post-1954 descent into civil war. It shows the longer historical genealogy of the Guatemalan military’s doctrine that Mayas were dangerous because they were “alien to modernity” and how the legacies of coerced labor and planter sovereignty reemerged with new meaning and contours during the scorched-earth campaign.

The introduction highlights how Guatemalan state-building in the nineteenth century continually rendered Mayas as anachronistic subjects rather than agents of the future. Guatemalan state officials and coffee planters labeled certain forms of difference uncivilized or anachronistic to justify denying citizenship rights and to legitimize the application of coerced labor laws to individuals deemed not yet civilized. However, as the Introduction highlights, Q’eqchi’ Mayas continually undermined these strategies and built innovative political modernities based on a combination of radical liberalism and Q’eqchi’ cosmologies. The Introduction provides an overview of how modern notions of linear, measurable time and space and racial-capitalism–based political modernities and colonialism interact. Finally, it provides a methodology for reading along and against the archival grain and for dialoguing with disparate visual, textual, and oral sources.

The Conclusion reflects on the implications of the study’s findings for future research, particularly in cultural theory. Victorian adaptive appearance is considered as a discourse that in certain ways prefigured the works of Charles Sanders Peirce and Jakob von Uexküll, and more recent theorisations of biosemiotics and zoosemiotics. The study shows that contemporary concepts of non-human and cross-species semiosis are less new than they may seem. However, it also problematises post-humanist celebrations of the supposed collapsing of the human/non-human binary. Similarly, the study shows that biosemiotic thinking does not necessarily align with progressive politics, as is sometimes assumed. As a cultural trope, adaptive appearance could both undermine and reinforce essentialist views of identity. It is suggested that the study’s discussions of visibility, recognition and appearance signpost new ways of approaching the politics of the gaze and the ideological stakes of female visibility. Some hints are offered on how researchers might explore the afterlives of adaptive appearance in twentieth-century science and culture. The chapter also notes how adaptive appearance has featured in retrospective fictive depictions of Victorian society and culture. Finally, parallels are suggested between Victorian adaptive appearance and current representations of environmental crisis.

This chapter focuses on the UK’s biggest and most influential festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (EFF), analyzing its benefits and risks. It considers some of the EFF’s advantages: the opportunities for artists to do a three-week run, to build relationships with other artists, and take part in an international hothouse for seeing work, learning, and developing. The chapter also considers the EFF’s pernicious effects: its unregulated labour conditions; environmental impact; lack of integration into Edinburgh’s year-round performance culture; economic and cultural exclusiveness; competitive individualization of success and failure; and pressures on mental health. It ends by proposing ways the EFF and its emulators could improve their social impact by investing in infrastructure, Edinburgh’s performance culture, and performance makers; actively supporting artists’ mental health; offering structural mentoring support; introducing regulations that protect workers; actively supporting more diverse makers, critics and audiences; and advocating for collaboration over competition. The chapter advocates for a vision of the fringe as, not a neo-liberal capitalist market, but a civic sphere.

The introductory chapter situates the sociopolitical context in which Muslim Americans find themselves in contemporary America. They appear to be front and center in contemporary American politics, occupying a prominent space in the national discourse.  The chapter also introduces who Muslim Americans are and highlights the diversity within the group and emphasizes that intersectionality is important to consider when evaluating the status of Muslim Americans. Next, the chapter argues that Muslim Americans, despite being a religious minority, have been racialized. Finally, the chapter concludes with a plan for the rest of the book.

In a conclusion, I argue that the reason these theories all fail is because attempting to excise liberalism from local citizenship is futile. Cities were built on commerce, and commerce is as much in the lifeblood of cities as politics is. But liberalism has never been only about commerce. It is also about equality. Because of its commitment to equality, liberalism has had a far better track record in advancing human freedom than any of its competitors. And as globalization has advanced, we may have gone too far down the path of liberalism to turn back. Embracing liberalism, while also committing to reforming it, will enable us to harness the best of local citizenship’s historical legacy for a future in which the fate of citizenship and the nation-state are still uncertain.