This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book develops an understanding of the problematics and transformative workings of migration and globalisation through contemporary art. It outlines how intensified globalisation and mobility have profoundly changed the discourses on art. The book traces, how in tandem with globalisation, the critical debates on identity politics and multiculturalism in the Western art world gradually paved the way for greater institutional recognition and visibility of artists with a migrant or minority background. It demonstrates that artists' interventions can be used as a critical tactic to navigate institutional structures. The book examines the nexus of forced migration, border control, securitisation and humanitarianism through the lens of some contemporary works of art that address the problematics of clandestine migration from Africa across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.

This chapter examines major changes in the organisation of economic activity over the last twenty or more years. These changes have emerged as a source of general economic insecurity, low-wage jobs, and new forms of employment-centred poverty. The chapter focuses on the major policies that have affected the condition of low-wage workers, and the growth dynamics in advanced service economies, especially the systemic outcomes concerning labour demand. It explains the ways in which the new terms of employment that have come about since the 1980s may also be contributing to insecurity and poverty. A key factor is the restructuring of labour markets that is part of deeply embedded features of advanced service economies. One of the most extreme forms of the casualisation of the employment relation is the informalisation of a growing array of activities.

Allen Ginsberg taught Shelley’s notion of the poet as legislator and the Romantic ideologeme that art could save the world, and conceived of the poet as shaman. He heard his father recite Romantic verse daily for years before he learned to read. This informed his championing of poetry’s “aural renaissance,” in which he played a role. Ginsberg’s early exposure to the first blues recordings made him a lifelong aficionado who taught blues as poetry. Immersion with Kerouac and friends in the New York jazz scene of the 1940s–1950s informed his and Kerouac’s writing, as they adapted jazz – which they equated to “Black speech” – in their writing. The Beats’ synthesis of post-Whitmanic American poetics with the rhythms and inflections of African-American vernacular speech took that argot to the masses, and influenced the 1960s generation of rockers, in particular the two musical phenomena that would carry the Beat/Romantic vision into global mass culture: Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

The carrying on of trade, both legal and illegal, between communities has been a fundamental feature of global economic relationships and an essential component of economic and social development. Modern-day trafficking is more than simply a reflection of an age old problem of illegal trade, because of the power of globalization. With Africa’s continuing integration into the global economy, the continent has becoming ever more vulnerable to the dark side of globalization that drives international trafficking. The challenge that the illicit trade in drugs and small arms brings to the continent is one far beyond the immediate impact of rising transnational criminal activity, but one that has broader implications for cross-cutting linkages to African security, stability and the future of African governance.

Women in the Irish nationalist tradition have played many different roles: at times acquiescent and passive and at times highly radical and deeply critical of restrictions based upon gender. In the exploration of women's relationship with Irish nationalist movements, the focus is upon their active participation within the various organisations inspired by nationalist ideals and their continuing efforts to overcome opposition to that participation. Sheehy-Skeffington's objections as a feminist centred less upon the notion of military uprising than on women's subordinate status in Cumann na mBan. Methods of resistance to British colonial rule have, over several centuries, taken many forms: political, cultural and military. Mary Condren and Sarah Benton argue that the pursuit of war, in heightening the cult of 'manliness', reinforces gender divisions to the extent that women's right to full citizenship in the future nation-state becomes a contested issue.

This chapter discusses the transformations of contemporary European cities and is intellectually influenced by the Italian political economy tradition, which is particularly attentive to territories and cities. This tradition paved the way for sophisticated intellectual arguments about social networks, religion, crime, the role of the middle classes articulated to different processes of non-economic factors of economic development, the welfare state, relations of the labour market and poverty. The chapter reviews the ongoing dynamics of the bulk of European metropolises together with the differentiation processes taking place. The European city model has been rather reinforced in most European metropolises. The chapter argues that both contemporary urbanisation processes and the transformation of cities in Europe might be fruitfully explained in relation to social and political transformations as articulated in the Italian tradition of political economy than in terms of neoliberalisation.

The subject matter of Joseph Noel Paton's painting was the Indian 'Mutiny' of 1857. For Anglo-Indians, the Mutiny served as a constant reminder of the tenuous nature of imperialism in India. The Mutiny shocked and appalled the Victorian public, and resulted in far-reaching administrative and military changes in India. The Mutiny and its aftermath also uncovered the interconnections of gender, violence and imperial political power in India. In rethinking their own position in relation to Indian insurgency, Anglo-Indian wives of the interwar period had to grapple with two hallowed conceptions of appropriate feminine responses to violence. Mainstream British narratives of the Mutiny deprived the Anglo-Indian woman of personal and historical agency. Rewriting the Mutiny and imperial violence to provide an active, empowered role for women was a necessary component of the image of the politically active and engaged 'imperial wife'.

This section presents an annotated critical edition of Jardines públicos , one of the ‘artículos de costumbres’, a type of satirical sketch that was popular in nineteenth-century Europe, by the Romantic journalist Mariano José de Larra (1809–37).