The slavery debates at Cambridge did not end with the emancipation of enslaved people in the Caribbean and India in 1843. In fact, undergraduates, fellows, and professors increasingly turned their attention to enslavement in the United States of America. Cambridge-educated abolitionists, such as Edward Strutt Abdy and Alexander Crummell, sought to mobilise opinion in both America and Britain against the persistent power of the enslaver class in the Southern United States. The outbreak of the American Civil War (1861–1865) inspired growing sympathy amongst educated British elites, including those at Cambridge, towards the Confederate cause, with many comparing American enslavers to landed British gentry in order to build camaraderie between British and American elites. The Confederacy, in turn, sought to lobby university men and mobilise student opinion in their favour to further the cause of Confederate diplomatic recognition in Britain.

The growing professionalisation of the law and the natural sciences owed much to the spread of the empire – and Cambridge intellectuals would benefit more than most from these processes. Natural philosophers travelled across the empire amassing botantical, geological, and antiquarian collections and expanding scientific knowledge, with much of the credit for their findings owed to local enslavers or enslaved Africans. Britons with financial investments in slave-trading organisations also donated to found professorships. In the case of the law, experts in international law and treaty-making, particularly Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, applied their expert knowledge to cases concerning piracy, plantation holdings, and imperial companies. As with missionary organisations, the problem of enslavement continued to be a source of debate in the eighteenth century, as philosophers of natural law and rights considered the ethical justifications for racial enslavement.

This chapter examines the role of Christology in the subfield of political theology. Political theologies examine the structure and logic of worldly power, assessing its relation to religious and theological dimensions of community formation, the cultivation of the citizen (often in contrast to the non-citizen or the enemy), expectations of messianic emergence and progress, and the potential for enacting meaningful political resistance. Christology is a major focus within the field of political theology both because of the historical role played by Christianity in the political development of Europe and Europe’s imperial and colonial footprint and because Christology is deeply invested in these very questions of power. This chapter focuses on key texts from the twentieth century that remain touchstones for the growing discipline of political theology as it exists today.

Hemingway’s work was well received from the moment he began to publish. Some of the key ways in which his work has been read were established from the beginning, as critics identified the core elements of Hemingway’s emergent style and as they responded to his resonant themes. Later generations of academic critics, however, brought to bear on Hemingway’s stories and novels the shifting frameworks that would emerge, become dominant, and linger residually in the institutions of literary studies. Chief among the frameworks that would enrich the reading of Hemingway’s work in subsequent decades were the attention to matters of gender and sexuality made legible by feminism and queer theory in the 1980s and 1990s and the attention to race as inextricable from the construction and focalization of Hemingway’s narratives in the 1990s and 2000s. Most recently, the rise of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, and critical disability studies has enabled fresh readings of the work, readings that keep it alive in current cultural debates. Throughout these changes, attention to Hemingway’s achievements in narrative form continues to be important, and it is as a crafter of sentences, and of narratives from carefully constructed sentences, that Hemingway continues to influence fiction writers.

This chapter explores the thought of the intellectual and revolutionary activist, Zweledinga Pallo Jordan, in South Africa. It argues that a global intellectual history approach can be usefully incorporated in understanding his key writings, both archival and curated. Jordan’s writings, largely overlooked, personify a vibrant and engaged intellectual project of anticolonialism, drawing from a transnational circulation of ideas. Their style, content, and form vary considerably, incorporating discussion papers, editorials, newspaper columns, published chapters, articles, speeches, and lectures. The chapter therefore recovers the meaning of the central ideas contained in these writings, by examining Jordan’s own biography and the global context of political exile. It focuses on significant themes such as nation, race, class, and democratic constitutionalism as Jordan attempts to articulate the scope of the South African national liberation project in line with his ideological commitment to the African National Congress (ANC).

Science and theatre were intertwined from the start of ‘modern drama’ in the works of Georg Buchner and Émile Zola, who ushered modern ideas about science into the theatre and made conscious engagement with science an intrinsic part of a break with the theatrical past. This chapter traces the explicit, conscious interaction between science and the modern stage, from August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen’s works through to those of Bernard Shaw, Leonid Andreyev, Maxim Gorky, Elizabeth Robins, Eugène Brieux, Harley Granville Barker, Karel Čapek, Tawfiq al-Hakim, James Ene Henshaw, Mary Burrill, Susan Glaspell, and Sophie Treadwell; the probing of race science on stage by Harlem Renaissance playwrights; the Federal Theatre Project’s science-inflected productions; and Bertolt Brecht’s changing depiction of science and scientists. In addition, there is another meaning of ‘science in the theatre’ that the chapter draws out: the hidden, often unacknowledged roles played by science and technology in staging.

This chapter studies relations between Schoenberg, Stravinsky and their respective camps, from the early twentieth century through the composers’ later years in California. Beginning with an early moment in which their relations were characterized by curiosity and mutual respect, it sketches the emergence in the 1920s of an opposition between Schoenberg’s expressionism and Stravinsky’s neoclassicism. It then examines how this opposition was reinterpreted and codified (if not ossified) in T. W. Adorno’s influential Philosophy of New Music, and in his subsequent writings on both composers. Adorno described Schoenberg’s music as a seismograph that registers tremors of feeling; this chapter reworks Adorno’s metaphor in order to propose that the Schoenberg–Stravinsky–Adorno triad might register tectonic movements of a much larger modernity. Engaging with recent literature on all three figures, it suggests some ways their work might relate to modern regimes of racial difference.

Doubling as a theorist of literary character, Virginia Woolf was invested in the tribulations of the modern face, which she approached through the twin genres of portraiture and biography. This chapter revolves around Woolf’s staging of the modernist face in her novel Orlando: A Biography (1928). Woolf’s novel traces a change in the history of the physiognomic face in modernity – from Orlando’s memorable face-to-face with Queen Elizabeth in the early modern period to her search for meaning in the faces around her in London in 1928. At the same time, Woolf’s novel functions as a portrait of Vita Sackville-West, introducing a queer woman into the gallery of memorable historical characters, which Woolf visualized in relation to the all-male National Portrait Gallery in London. Through an engagement with Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s recent photographic reflections on Orlando, developed as a response to the racialized opening of the novel, the chapter frames modernist faciality’s mediation by racial difference.

This chapter explores disciplinary offences in professional tennis, namely anything but doping, corruption, fraud or similar offences. These disciplinary offences are typically found in relevant codes adopted by the three key tennis actors. They involve physical violence on and off the courts; audible obscenity, visible obscenity and verbal abuse; indiscipline and how it has actually contributed to the commercialization of the sport in many ways; the case of grunting; coaching infractions; and Wimbledon dress code. The chapter examines the adjudication and enforcement of disciplinary rules and how these have been transformed with modernity, further touching upon issues of race and mental health and their function in the enforcement of disciplinary rules. The case of Osaka is explored in detail, whose refusal to play certain tournaments as a result of her mental health was viewed as a breach of the WTA’s rules.

Chapter 7 builds on recent scholarship demonstrating that print technology was foundational to concepts of racial identity and whiteness in particular. It explores how writers appealed to the phrase “the art of printing” to describe racial sameness and otherness as a set of ethnic, geographical, and bodily differences. Press technology itself gave people a way to talk about race, which in turn framed racial concepts for later writers.

After looking at Aggrey and the African Association (AA), the second chapter continues the examination of the intellectual strands that wove together to inspire the future leaders of the AA to promote an African identity and build the African nation. It examines the intellectual biographies of the early AA leaders and how they came to conceptualize the African continent and people. This is done by examining geography lessons in missionary schools and tracing out encounters with South Asians and other East African political figures such as Harry Thuku of Kenya, Prince Akiiki Nyabongo of Uganda, and an African-American named F. Burgess. By recreating the issues and ideas that shaped the formation of the AA, I argue that there was a clear continental, and not territorial, vision from the start.

In The Secret Life of Copyright, copyright law meets Black Lives Matter and #MeToo in a provocative examination of how our legal regime governing creative production unexpectedly perpetuates inequalities along racial, gender, and socioeconomic lines while undermining progress in the arts. Drawing on numerous case studies – Harvard’s slave daguerreotypes, celebrity sex tapes, famous Wall Street statues, beloved musicals, and dictator copyrights – the book argues that, despite their purported neutrality, key rules governing copyrights – from the authorship, derivative rights, and fair use doctrines to copyright’s First Amendment immunity – systematically disadvantage individuals from traditionally marginalized communities. Since laws regulating the use of creative content increasingly mediate participation and privilege in the digital world, The Secret Life of Copyright provides a template for a more robust copyright system that better addresses egalitarian concerns and serves the interests of creativity.

In this chapter, the founding of the magazine The End and the Toxteth riots are twin jumping off points for a history of Liverpool’s subcultural resistance to Thatcherism via music, fanzines, and football in the 1980s. The chapter analyses the tensions between race, class, and politics, which profoundly shaped the history of the club and the city during this troubled decade.

The dictatorial regime of Jorge Ubico silenced virtually all internal sociopolitical opposition in Guatemala during the interwar period (1931–44). To circumvent this restrictive political terrain, journalists Luz Valle and Gloria Menéndez Mina created literary journals ostensibly published with advice on home making and personal style which furtively cultivated an intellectual space that reflected transnational antifascist conversations. These journals served as incubators for antifascist, democratic ideals during a period of intense intellectual repression, ideals that revolutionary reformers translated directly into social and political democracy created by the October Revolution in 1944. Within a deeply patriarchal society, the journals’ gender analysis also expanded revolutionary vision of justice to include the political and social inclusion of women. Therefore, the extent to which the Guatemalan Revolution embraced antifascist ideals can be traced in part to the ideas published in Nosotras and Azul.