Latinx children’s and young adult literature offers Latinx children opportunities to step into another world and also see themselves represented in what they read. By giving Latinx child readers, in particular, worlds unlike and like their own, authors like Lilliam Rivera, Edwidge Danticat, and Marcia Argueta Mickelson also challenge dominant national narratives about Latinx experiences in the United States. In the stories these writers tell, young protagonists are confronted by various symptoms of US imperialism, such as racism, xenophobia, and homophobia. The protagonists’ journey often includes learning more about the oppressions that plague them and their communities and finding ways to dismantle said oppressions. Recognizing the role that the United States had in the forced (im)migration of many people of Latin American descent allows for a narrative shift away from the “immigration story” to a story of US imperialism and its consequences. Examining race and empire in Latinx children’s literature creates possibilities for alternative ways of knowing and existing where Latinx children can step in and out of worlds unlike and like their own.

The vast majority of emigrant veterans returned to their pre-war places of residence. Between bureaucratic hurdles, economic difficulties and the fact that many were leaving their loved ones behind in Italy, this was not an easy choice. This chapter covers the period of 1919 to 1921 and examines the early years of the emigrants’ reintegration into their lives abroad. The men faced different difficulties depending on their country of residence and personal circumstances. As veterans of a foreign – albeit Allied – army, Italians found themselves ineligible for national support schemes designed for British, French or American ex-servicemen and at the same time were cut off from supports on offer back in Italy. The issue of pensions was a major and ongoing problem. Even when the veterans received them, they did not stretch very far in expensive cities outside Italy and it was up to private charitable organisations to fill the gap. While in some countries the men found their status as veterans used against them, in the US, it was taken as proof of their good character. Thus, the arrival of Italian veterans was generally regarded in highly positive terms as it bucked the perceived trend of ‘low-quality’ Italian immigrants.

From the Enlightenment, liberal political economic thought, and the history of science, to the nation-building, ideas of citizenship, and border-setting that have defined European political and geographical space, and to racial capitalism and imperialism’s foundational role in shaping modern European economies, politics, law, and modernity, race has been central to modern Europe’s history, including its most painful episodes, and to the “global turn” in writing European history. Antiracism associated with internationalism, anticolonialism, and decolonization has also profoundly shaped European history and its writing – especially the “global turn.” Yet, considerations of economic, intellectual, political, religious, and other aspects of European history continue to neglect race and racial thought. This chapter examines the literature produced by the global turn on the role of race and racism in European history and reflects on its persistent marginalization in narratives of European history.

Chapter 5 argues that the increasing number of female servants and resulting visibility of women at court had political ramifications. By exploring the more active roles played by ladies and damsels in political events of the realm, I demonstrate how female courtiers found ways to access privilege for themselves, their families, and other associates through intercession. For example, they dramatically assisted Isabella’s coup against her husband Edward II and courageously stood by Catherine of Aragon during her divorce crisis. On the other hand, when national sentiment turned xenophobic, a queen’s foreign attendants faced scorn, retribution, and even banishment during periods of conflict. Some female attendants faced misogynistic attitudes that attacked their perceived propensity toward immodest sexuality, greed, and darker forces like witchcraft and poisoning. This role of women at court – apart from queens and particularly notorious examples like Edward III’s mistress Alice Perrers – has been neglected in many discussions of medieval court politics and patronage. I contend that the hostility experienced by some female courters highlights how medieval contemporaries themselves recognized women’s potential access to insider information about monarchs and the favors that could be bestowed to their kin, friends, and associates.

The nationalist element of Brexit populism had an entrenched ethnocentric character that was capable of breaking out in the in the form of racism. By 2016 overt racism had become taboo in public, but Brexitspeak had the linguistic means to dog whistle it. The new racism also enlarged the sense of ‘racism’ to cover refugee migrants entering the UK who were not dark-skinned. The sources of racism in the UK are diverse and subject to debate. In this chapter the focus is on the likely impact of racist demagoguery in generating and sustaining long-term racist attitudes. The example of Enoch Powell and his ‘rivers of blood’ speech is scrutinised in detail. But Powellism persisted well beyond the 1960s and 1970s: twenty years on it motivated the murder of Stephen Lawrence. In the age of the internet, Powell was a legitimising icon among neo-Nazi networks and appeared in website videos quoting and visualising his notorious speech. But veneration of Powell also remained apparent among right-wing Conservative politicians, activists and writers, and in their networking with ultra-right individuals.

The epilogue brings the narrative from the early years of the new century to recent events, just before sending the manuscript to print, in mid 2024. It tells of the changing attitudes in Germany both towards Jews living in that country and towards Israel and its policies of occupation in the Palestinian West Bank. The unique German–Israeli relationship during the last two decades is sketched against the background of the past, and finally, it is attempted to draw a balance between the apparent achievement of a decent Jewish life in Germany, on the one hand, and the new dangers of a rising politically organized right, simultaneously with a growing critique of Israel and the apparent emergence of a new antisemitism, on the other hand.

This chapter addresses the nexus between racism and return migration in the early 1980s, which marked the peak of anti-Turkish racism. As the call “Turks out!” (Türken raus!) grew louder, policymakers debated passing a law that would, in critics’ view, “kick out” the Turks and violate their human rights. During this “racial reckoning,” West Germans, Turkish migrants, and observers in Turkey grappled with the nature of racism itself. Although West Germans silenced the language of “race” (Rasse) and “racism” (Rassismus) after Hitler, there was an explosion of public discourse about those terms. Ordinary Germans, moreover, wrote to their president expressing their concerns about migration, revealing both biological and cultural racism. The simultaneous rise in Holocaust memory culture (Erinnerungskultur) is crucial for understanding this racial reckoning. While many Germans warned against the mistreatment of Turks as an unseemly continuity to Nazism, the emphasis on the singularity of the Holocaust offered Germans a way to dismiss anti-Turkish sentiment. Turkish migrants fought against this structural and everyday racism with various methods of activism. Turks at home, including the government and media following the 1980 military coup, viewed these debates with self-interest, lambasting German racism in the context of the 1983 remigration law.

This chapter explains different definitions of citizenship including citizenship as status, as rights, as participation, and as identity. It highlights key immigration laws and periods of immigrant inclusion and exclusion. The chapter also presents basic data on demographic change through American political history.

This chapter discusses the entanglement of Brexit with the subsequent pandemic and the war in Ukraine, both of which have been used to muddy Brexit’s economic impact. It first analyses the rhetoric of the Leave campaign and of those politicians advocating for and negotiating Brexit. Those negotiations are bound to continue while politicians are reluctant to acknowledge Brexit as unfinished business. It then contextualizes contemporary fears of unlimited immigration as an echo of postimperial anxieties about British identity. These also feature in literary responses to Brexit which make them condition-of-England novels rather than investigations of wider Anglo-European relations. Forging a dialogue between the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fallout from the fourteenth-century bubonic plague suggests that political leadership and economic steer are crucial in determining a country’s recovery. How the pandemic was handled in the UK, paired with the economic impact of Brexit, aggravated the global supply issues caused by the war in Ukraine. This was not an inevitable outcome.

This chapter considers how English dictionaries made sense of sexuality beyond modern English society. It begins with the early modern assumption that a nation’s character was commensurate with its language, and that the moderate nature of England’s language and culture entailed that any ‘excess’ found in either must be the result of foreign influence. The chapter examines how sodomy and buggery, along with the semantic field of pederasty, were positioned by etymological, general, and hard-word dictionaries as ethically and ethnically remote, vices practised in the Mediterranean by ancient heathens or modern heretics. These xenophobic associations remained in dictionaries into the nineteenth century. Conversely, lexicographers’ retellings of classical myths of same-sex love—male and female—reveal sites of tension between the moderns’ veneration of Greek and Roman literature and their rejection of its pagan sensuality. The life of Sappho in particular provoked sharp disagreements over what her moral character had been, and what could or should be said about it, in a range of dictionary genres: hard-word, general, classical, and biographical.

The aim of this chapter will be threefold: to revisit the economic arguments advanced by Hilton and others by considering them in their full political context; to provide an account of the identity of the attackers and of the Flemings who were killed in East Anglia and London by drawing on documentary and prosopographical work; and to evaluate the effects of the massacre on the immigrant community and immigration in England after 1381. First, it will reconstruct a three-decade-long quarrel between native and alien weavers of London which culminated in the murder of Flemings during the Peasants’ Revolt.Then, attention will be turned to the available judicial records in order to develop the biographies and prosopography both of the attackers and the victims in East Anglia. Finally, the years after the revolt will be examined from the perspective of old and new immigrants, both of which groups seem to have been affected.

In the spring of 1593, a spate of viciously xenophobic libels appeared throughout London. The most notorious of these, the so-called Dutch Church libel, landed Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe in some trouble, possibly due to its prominent allusions to Marlowe’s plays. This chapter argues that the collaborative, censored playscript Sir Thomas More reprises the incendiary confluence of libel, xenophobia, and drama that took place in 1593. The play’s opening scenes dramatize the anti-immigrant Evil May Day riot of 1517 with an eye to the 1590s, showing the strangers’ crimes and the violent resistance of London’s citizens. The citizens take their grievances public once all legal avenues for redress have failed. Yet libel and riot are not the only extralegal recourses in the play. The latter two-thirds of Sir Thomas More track the rise and fall of its titular character, who himself repeatedly confronts the limits of the law. Thomas More’s career extends the initial dramatization of libel into an extended meditation on the remedies available to any subject afflicted by unjust law, from bills and libels to riot to the vexed administration of equity and the vagaries of conscience.

This chapter examines the politics of American immigrant fiction in the twentieth century, a time period that saw three large waves of immigration. The first took place between 1880 and 1924 and consisted primarily of European immigrants and Asian immigrants. The second wave ranged from 1924 to 1965 and was much smaller than the first, largely due to shifting political views toward immigrants which resulted in legislation that significantly restricted the flow of newcomers. The third wave was triggered in 1965 by another change in both national attitude and policy and it lasted into the early decades of the twentieth century. During this time, the immigrant novel reflected political realities through its portrayal of how migration to the United States brought success for some and marginalization for others. The genre confronted the myth that all newcomers enjoy equal potential to achieve the “American Dream” by exposing how racialization, the process of assigning individuals to categories based on characteristics such as skin color or facial features, significantly determined inclusion or exclusion.

Chapter 3 considers the making into ‘migrants’ of those who moved and asks what it meant for their kinship relations. It looks at processes of migrant-making through encounters at three different scales: nationally (with the British state), locally (with their neighbours, strangers, and other Christians), and transnationally (with their kin), arguing that migration compressed these two historical generations into one ‘migrant’ generation. At the same time, I show how migrants participated in these processes, particularly vis-à-vis their kin and, in doing so, fuelled the latter’s expectations of economic and other support. Central to the discussion are the ways in which the imaginings of migrant and non-migrant kin diverged post-migration, creating friction transnationally. Christianity also features prominently in this chapter, as migrants sought to make sense of their dashed expectations, while seeking means to pursue their aspirations and cultivate a sense of belonging.