The world of cricket was often presented as a microcosm of England itself and more widely of the British Empire. The problem for English cricket in the post-war and post-colonial era was how to modernise and adapt. Understanding how the game appeared to lose its authority and become part of John Major's 'heritage' England requires two approaches. The first looks at the ideological baggage cricket brought with it and how the Village cricket' vision of England was received in an era of affluence, greater equality and a less deferential social structure. The second examines the difficulty of seeing cricket as a source of imperial consensus during the process of decolonisation and conflict within the Commonwealth. The reasons for the failure of cricket to adapt to its new surroundings, and hence the steady decline of the game and its importance, can be found within wider changes in post-war British society.

This chapter focuses on the examples of art practices that have in various ways sought to create, contemplate and complicate situations of social encounter in relation to various aspects of the post-Troubles predicament. In an essay on the use and value of public gesture in art and politics, Jan Verwoert proposes that the 'performative dynamics of the practices that bind society together' can be productively understood as 'inherently chaotic'. In the versions of socially and situationally responsive art practices in contemporary Northern Ireland, one critical issue of concern might potentially be articulated as a two-part question. This two-part question is regarding how we might imagine new conceptions and situations of commonality and publicness. The provocations, deliberate contradictions and nervy 'inadequacies' of the contemporary art are awkward, disruptive effects and vital imperfections that trouble any resolved 'message' that might appear to be available.

This chapter maps Allen Ginsberg’s magnificent epic which dissects the US in the Vietnam era. It shared the National Book Award in 1973. Anchored by “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” the volume’s pivotal poem, it boasts the key line, “I here declare the end of the war,” and includes seventy-five other poems, among them elegies for Neal Cassady and Che Guevara. The chapter shows how Ginsberg links fragments – newspaper headlines, radio broadcasts, lyrics from popular songs and more – into a coherent lament for America itself. It also dissects the journal the poet kept while traveling across the nation and that provided him with the raw material for The Fall of America.

This chapter proposes a comprehensive approach to imperial rhetorics in the Spanish African territories. It explains the shifting connotations of Spain's imperial rhetoric on three different analytical levels. The chapter addresses the official construction of Spain's inclusive imperial discourse, hispanotropicalismo, which, like its closely related Portuguese counterpart lusotropicalismo, promoted the fiction of harmonious multi-ethnic and multi-continental nations. This imperial discourse was underpinned with rhetorics of progress and modernization that registered major impact in the colonies on an individual level, namely, on both imperial agents from peninsular Spain and 'partners' from the colonies. The chapter presents a case study of the colonial branch of Spain's official women's organization Seccion Femenina de Falange (SF) and its efforts to foster a cooperative, female elite. It reveals how official rhetorics legitimized and shaped actions in the so-called overseas provinces.

Anglo-Indian women had constructed an identity centred on the Raj. Anglo-Indian wives were tacitly allowed to participate in the politics of empire, carrying out the quotidian tasks of governance and shaping the policies of British imperialism in India. As Anglo-Indian wives had feared, Indian men inherited the mantle of political power from the British in 1947. In 1947, the British government unilaterally terminated Anglo-Indian women's integral involvement with British imperialism in India and acceded to the long-standing demands of Indians for political autonomy. Indian men may have derided Anglo-Indian women as 'brainless memsahibs', but the British government similarly scorned their contribution to empire. After decades of being married to the empire, the Anglo-Indian wife suddenly found herself divorced. Most Anglo-Indian officials still in India at independence departed shortly after 1947, acknowledging that they were generally neither wanted nor needed in the newly independent nation.

The collapse of France's metropolitan forces during the second week of June 1940 was a calamity for the French empire. The French supreme commander, General Maurice Gamelin, was made the scapegoat for the German breakthrough and was dismissed in disgrace at the height of the battle on 19 May. French defeat in Europe was bound to make the preservation of imperial control more difficult, especially in North Africa. In Tunis, popular unease over the French defeat was fuelled by the intimidating shadow of neighbouring Italian Libya and the rapid arrival of Italian armistice commissioners in the capital. In June 1940, the British government soon lost the initiative in persuading the French colonies to continue the fight. In spite of the prevailing conservatism within French colonial administration, during July and early August converts to the Free French cause emerged in a number of French territories.

This introductory chapter provides a rationale for the study of Allen Ginsberg and his poetry while outlining the major themes, issues, and motivations of the volume. Ginsberg is an essential figure in twentieth-century US poetics. His work is an important part of the larger turn from “closed” to “open” verse forms in the postwar period, and his role as perhaps the major countercultural figure in the 1960s and 1970s meant that his work garnered an international audience. The goal of this volume is to provide readers with the context necessary to understand how Ginsberg’s life and interests shaped his work; how his work, in its turn, entered the greater poetic discourse of the time; and finally, how Ginsberg sought to influence not just American but indeed global political and cultural realities of the postwar period. Taking a broadly chronological approach, this volume charts the wide variety of contexts crucial to understanding not just Ginsberg, his writing, and his career, but many of the larger trends of the long twentieth century as well.

Liberty' was a shared constitutional and legal concept in the thought of the eighteenth century Anglo-American world. Competing constructions of liberty were reflected in divergent views about the rule of law as its guarantee. This chapter explores the deployment of the rule of law at both an ideological and a practical level in two very different British colonies established within three years of each other, New South Wales and Upper Canada. The operation of the rule of law in two Georgian colonies show that the differences in interpreting and understanding its meaning, debated in the eighteenth century in Britain, the American colonies and Ireland, lived on into the later British Empire. The rule of law can embrace not only generic imperial, national or colony-wide law and justice, but also law and justice embodying local community aspirations and needs.

This chapter draws on data from across the range of research methods to ascertain how young people use and experience city-centre space and the impact that this space has on their varying emerging identities. It outlines the relational aspect of identities. Identities are performed in interaction with others, but these interactions occur within specific places, again underlining the important overall relationship between place and identity. As teenagers move across different spaces they interact with a broader range of people, adding further complexities to their spatial experiences. The chapter reveals a number of additional boundaries and practices of exclusion and inclusion based on generation and teen subcultures. At the same time, when young people from interface areas visit city-centre spaces, ethnonational identities often simmer beneath the surface.