This concluding chapter offers some final reflections on the nature of knowledge about ethnicity in Kenya. I argue that if the nature of this knowledge is purposefully vague and makes ethnic categories polyvalent, then the best way to protect against problematic uses of ethnic knowledge is vigilance. This is far less satisfying and reassuring than law or rights as a framework for governing the risks of diversity, but it is far more appropriate, and I briefly consider what this might look like. Finally, I look forward to the digitisation of Kenya’s population register and aspirations to establish a population knowledge architecture so sophisticated that it could render numerous registers interoperable and ultimately replace even the census. I reflect on the nature of ethnic classification in such an architecture and argue that it would lose all the qualities that have made it amenable to solidaristic and pluralistic purposes thus far, while amplifying all its dangers.

This chapter examines the rise of U.S. interest in the Nicaragua Canal in the context of the Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century as well as the beginning of a transatlantic rivalry between Great Britain and the United States over control of the canal route. This chapter illuminates how the status of the Mosquito Kingdom as an Indigenous polity became the crucial fulcrum around which this transatlantic rivalry operated so that the Mosquito question became inextricably linked to the Canal question at a time when the canal also became central to Nicaragua’s nationalist project and regional aspirations.

Carter examines the use that some pragmatists have made of the black intellectual tradition (BIT), “the body of belles-lettres, polemical essays, pamphlets, speeches, books, slave narratives, poetry, articles, fiction, and sermons that articulate the experiences in the Americas of African-descendant peoples.” He describes assumptions underlying attempts to connect the BIT to classical pragmatism, e.g., that elements of the BIT illuminate works of pragmatists, that the BIT complements pragmatism, and that pragmatist ideas can be used to correct aspects of the BIT. He examines strategies pragmatists have used to make that connection, from simply assuming that there is such a connection, to arguing from the fact that a black philosopher was taught by a pragmatist to the conclusion that the philosopher’s work is pragmatist in nature, to showing that the ideas of a black philosopher are similar to or compatible with those of a classical pragmatist. Criticizing the tendency to appropriate the BIT in an effort to improve pragmatism without acknowledging that the BIT is itself philiosophical, Carter argues for a more intentional examination of these integrative efforts.

Friendship is a consequential relationship for child development and well-being. This chapter examines recent research on three major themes related to children’s friendships. We begin by reviewing findings from several long-term longitudinal studies documenting the diverse and multifaceted impacts of childhood and adolescent friendship competencies and experiences on later adjustment. We also highlight how these long-term longitudinal studies have allowed researchers to test and refine theoretical perspectives about how early family and peer relationships facilitate the development of skills and understandings that set the stage for social competence and positive adjustment later in development. With this as background, we review theory and research on the processes and provisions that characterize children’s friendships, and then describe important contextual factors that affect children’s friendships, with a particular focus on the school context and how contextual factors can facilitate or undermine the development and maintenance of cross-group friendship.

This chapter will look at Wollstonecraft’s multilayered critique of domination which she applies across economic classes, races, and genders.  It will review some objections to the claim that Wollstonecraft’s feminism really is relevant to the concerns of today’s feminists. Namely, does Wollstonecraft address concerns relevant to all women, or simply that of eighteenth-century white, middle-class British women? I argue that it does, and that Wollstonecraft can and should be considered a precursor of decolonial and intersectional feminism. In order to do so I ask what she had to say about class, slavery and racism, gender and sexual orientation.

The ‘logic’ of charity in modern Britain has been understood as ‘complex’ and ‘varied’: ‘a loose and baggy monster’. Charity after Empire takes this complexity as the basis for a new interpretation. First, the indeterminacy of the role and function of charity lay behind its popularity and growth. With no fixed notions of what they should be or what they should do, charities and NGOs have expanded because they have been many things to many people. Second, the messy practices of aid meant success could always be claimed amidst uncertain objectives and outcomes, triggering further expansion. Third, just as charity was welcomed as a solution to poverty overseas, its scope and potential were contained by powerful political actors who restricted its campaigning and advocacy work. Fourth, racial injustice, especially apartheid, shaped not only humanitarianism overseas but also the domestic governance of charity in Britain. It all resulted not only in the massive expansion of charity but also limitations placed on its role and remit.

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.

This chapter engages with the scholarship of legal academics Upendra Baxi and Ratna Kapur. In conversation with the academics, I read two of their texts: ‘An Open Letter to the Chief Justice of India’ (OL) co-authored by Baxi and his colleagues Vasudha Dhagamwar, Raghunath Kelkar and Lotika Sarkar; and Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law in India (SS) co-authored by Kapur and her friend and colleague Brenda Cossman. I look at how, while addressing questions of gender, class and caste, the formation of the OL inhabited conversations between Baxi, his colleagues, a judge, and a tribal girl named Mathura, drawing on whose experiences the letter was written, in late-1970s post-Emergency India. I draw out from these conversations how Baxi shaped his role and responsibility in public life as a feminist law teacher and how, in doing so, he shaped mutual ties with his academic discipline of law. I locate my reading of Subversive Sites in the context of the legal academia from where Kapur and her co-author, Brenda Cossman, conceived the ideas and practices that informed the writing of their book. SS inhabited Kapur’s conversations in the early 1990s after the economic liberalisation of India, with her friend and colleague Cossman and the Indian women’s movement. Through these conversations, Kapur shaped her role and responsibility in public life as a post-colonial feminist legal scholar, and in doing so, formed mutual relations with her academic discipline of law.

In this chapter Angeline Morrison offers an exquisitely written account of what mythopoeic singing means to her and why it is central to reimagining the history of British folk music. Drawing on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, she highlights the transformative power of song. Disembodied, imaginal, or non-physical things, she argues, can be sung into being. This process can serve the cause of decolonization by engaging in a form of contemporary mythmaking that re-enchants and re-populates historical landscapes with figures known to have been present, but who may not be identifiable in the body of song that survives.

This essay explores William James’s debt to Charles Peirce, arguing that this debt is integral to pragmatism’s historical use-value for studies of race and racism. Scholars of race have historically found pragmatism useful because of its anti-foundationalism. A philosophical stance resistant to abstraction and ossification, pragmatism’s emphasis on continuity through adaptation makes it useful for dismantling racial essentialism while preserving the experience of social and historical continuity necessary for the ongoing recognition of disenfranchised groups. In the late nineteenth century, however, pragmatism failed to reckon with the systematic denial of power and representation to racialized subjects. I argue that this failure is inseparable from pragmatism’s weddedness to the concept of experience and that a deep dive into how pragmatists have relied on this concept to negotiate the relationship between mind and body reveals the racial contours of its genealogy. Transforming what for Peirce was a methodological rule for scientific investigation into a theory of Truth, James imagined a world made entirely of subjects rather than objects. In so doing, he also dismantled the dialectical aspect of Peirce’s principle and the semiotics on which it depends. As this essay argues, James’s pragmatism does have potential for interpreting the history and significance of race. This potential, though, lies less in its anti-foundationalism than in its materialism and a reclamation of Peirce’s more dialectical model of embodied consciousness.

This chapter discusses the sympathetic relationship between the gothic and sublimity regarding their serving similar social and political functions, emphasising their adaptability to the rhetorical interests of those in power in a given place and time. It then goes on to clarify their differences and consider whether they have a more ‘universal’ application than typically understood by taking a broadly historical approach, to examine the xenophobic and gendered origins of the sublime, and the ideological changes that come with the post-Kantian tradition. Rethinking the sublime as the differend identified by Jean-François Lyotard alerts us to imbalanced power relations and the demand for new idioms that give voice to the silenced, thus avoiding the sublime’s traditional claim to transcendence and therefore Western humanism. Similarly, a world-gothic sublime serves to witness the differend, the power imbalance between the ‘normal,’ who sets the terms of any tribunal, and the Other, who is silenced.

This chapter reads images of capital’s bloodsucking thirst in works of Mozambican literature as an aesthetic registration of the destructive impact of capitalist extractivism upon the life and land of southern Africa. Focusing on Noémia de Sousa’s poem ‘Magaíça’ (1950) and Orlando Mendes’s novel Portagem (1966), it argues that writers have turned to spectral motifs and gothic devices as a figural means of coming to terms with the historical legacy of migrant labour in the political economy of colonial Mozambique. This cross-border economic system subordinated the interests of the Portuguese settlers to the imperatives of capitalist accumulation in neighbouring South Africa, at the same time as it ensured the continuing immiseration of the colonised population. Mobilising an aesthetics of vampirism and spectrality, Mozambican texts have limned a world-gothic critique both of the local history of semi-proletarisnisation in the country, and of the insertion of the region of southern Africa into the global circuits of (post-)colonial capitalism.

This chapter considers the ambiguous utopian impulses of literary, filmic, and television works published and produced in the 1970s. Drawing on the concept of post-imperial melancholy, the chapter traces the utopian contours of these texts’ forceful, often shocking, critique of British imperial nostalgia. It focuses on sub-genres that emerged during this significant decade, including the British alternate history, the dystopia, and reworkings of the classical literary utopia, with reference to writers such as Daphne Du Maurier, Len Deighton, Anthony Burgess, Emma Tennant, Angela Carter, and J. G. Ballard. These three genres, the chapter argues, critically interrogate the utopian impulse in the 1970s and its possible instantiations in national and transnational imagined communities, as well as the built environment in which the modernity of these communities is expressed. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, identifying how this iconic 1970s punk film reframes the classical narrative structure of literary utopias.

This chapter examines the ‘peculiar’ utopian temporality of the contemporary moment as expressed in the fictional works of three Black British female writers: Queenie (2019), by Candace Carty-Williams, Swing Time (2016) by Zadie Smith, and Girl, Woman, Other (2019) by Bernadine Evaristo. The chapter argues that these novels represent a particular incarnation of utopian realism. This names a strong commitment in contemporary British fiction to articulating post-racial futures. In utopian realist texts, writers use realism not to convey mimetic depictions of the present here and now but, rather, to convince readers of the viability of alternative, transformed futures. Utopian realists such as Candace Carty-Williams, Zadie Smith, Bernadine Evaristo, Monica Ali, and Diana Evans foreground a relationship between utopian thinking and models drawn from personal and historic experience. Like design fictions, the term given for fictional narratives used by designers of prototype products and technologies to help imagine their future use, these texts offer readers identifiable utopian alternatives to contemporary Britain. Shaped in relation to the long history of Black experience in the United Kingdom, as well as gender and queerness, these novels reveal the need to consider the future not as a speculative possibility but a realisable plan for how we might live.

This chapter explores works by two contemporary London-based Black British playwrights who also direct, produce, and perform: debbie tucker green and Mojisola Adebayo. Examining plays produced and performed between 2005 and 2019, the chapter suggests that both women create distinctive work that combines singular dramaturgy with transformative politics, shifting the framing of spectatorial perspective. They are also known for making innovative, experimental, and poetical work at the intersection of aesthetics and politics. The chapter traces the Blochian utopian possibility of ‘something’s missing’ (etwas fehlt) in tucker green’s dramaturgy of refusal. In her plays, the chapter suggests, we can identify what Herbert Marcuse’s called ‘the Great Refusal’, which develops a utopian sensibility via negation. Frequently working class, Black, and female, tucker green’s belligerent characters reveal to audiences what is missing in their difficult lives, how everything should be different in Britain. In Adebayo’s work, forged in the community-led Black Mime Theatre in the 1990s, utopian possibility forms part of the affective spectatorial encounter with her theatre. Whilst Adebayo’s plays are less abrasive, they similarly highlight what is missing. The transformative energy of her dramaturgy can be seen in utopian foretastes of alternative lives, in which Black, queer, and de-colonial modes of intersubjectivity become possible.