Chapter 9 explores whether racial rhetorical representation matters in the presence or absence of tangible legislation. To answer this question, we return to our experiment and inform respondents that the topic the elected official spoke about in the press release either became law or failed. After providing information about the fate of legislation, we ask respondent whether this changes their opinion of the elected official. We find that even when rhetorical representation does not lead to policy, most Black and White respondents do not view the hypothetical politician as engaging in cheap talk. Instead, their qualitative responses reveal that they understand that a single politician cannot will the passage of legislation. They also express appreciation for the elected official for speaking out about a particular topic as they perceive it as laying the groundwork for future action. In this sense, rhetorical representation without legislation still matters to voters. With that said, when rhetorical representation was matched up with the passage of pertinent legislation, respondents gave the elected official a boost in approval. Thus, speaking out about a topic and failing does not hurt elected officials, engaging in rhetorical representation and succeeding leads to a bonus in support.

A conversation curated from an online event, Decolonising the Arts in Latin America: Anti-Racist Irruptions in the Art World. Artists from different parts of Latin America talk about their work from a decolonial and anti-racist perspective. Participants include Miriam Álvarez, director of the Mapuche theatre company El Katango; Alejandra Ejido, director of the Afro-Argentine company Teatro en Sepia; Ashanti Dinah Orozco, Afro-Colombian poet and Afro-feminist activist; Rafael Palacios, founder and director of the Afro-contemporary dance company Sankofa Danzafro; and Arissana Pataxó and Denilson Baniwa, Brazilian Indigenous visual artists.

The introduction situates political writing and publishing as vital tools in articulating, disseminating, and shaping political movements and ideas in modern Britain. It explores the diversity of political genres, from elite forms such as parliamentary novels and newspaper obituaries to grassroots expressions such as punk fanzines and coalfield women’s writing. It highlights how ‘high political’ and subaltern voices respectively engaged with political writing, sometimes to reinforce dominant narratives and at other times to challenge or subvert them. It examines the gendered politics of authorship, particularly how women and marginalised groups used writing to claim authority and reshape the boundaries of political discourse. Attention is given to the role of literature and publishing in mediating the intersections of culture and politics, from fascist propaganda and socialist poetry to the intellectual infrastructure of devolved Scotland and Northern Ireland. By contextualizing political writing within broader historical and cultural transformations, the introduction positions the chapters of the book as a series of ‘core samples’ that reveal the relationships between genre, ideology, and activism.

Chapter 4 turns towards the role of women’s work in reproducing the household, focusing on the labour of relation-making in the neighbourhood as a means of creating economic networks through which material assistance can be sought. Commenting on anthropological literature that frames African contexts as ones of ‘mutuality’ and ‘obligation’, the chapter discusses the difficulty of finding assistance for aspirational projects (especially school fees) in an atomised neighbourhood where families compete for the prestige of economic advancement. It remarks upon the possibilities and limits of caring labour as a means through which women enter into economic relations of mutual support with others.

The conversation draws on two texts by members of the art collective Identidad Marrón, which both explore how racialised subalterns can decolonise the art world and specifically museums. The first is a statement by visual artist Abril Caríssimo; the second is a text by Flora Alvarado y América López, titled ‘Malonear los museos’, reflecting on their experience of curating an exhibition titled Qué necesitan aprender los museos? (What Do Museums Need to Learn?) for the public Palais de Glace museum, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Chapter 1 investigates how naval reforms in the late 18th century aimed at rationalizing production, marked by standardizing, centralizing, and concentrating the shipbuilding process in the context of provisioning crisis and market relations. It gives a brief overview of shipbuilding and its transformation in the late eighteenth century, both in the Ottoman Empire and in Europe. It highlights the increasing dependence of the navy on market relations and dynamics in the late eighteenth century, catalyzed by the provisioning crisis emanating from technological transformations, naval competition and military pressures, environmental restrictions, and political-economic challenges, as illustrated by the example of provisioning timber. Against this crisis, naval administrations introduced substantial changes in the production process under the supervision of French naval engineers, whose policies centered on professionalization and the use of “scientific” principles in shipbuilding. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the spatial concentration of capital in the Arsenal, by renewing and expanding its production capacity and exerting centralized control over the production process.

This chapter considers three interrelated genres of political writing that have been particularly prominent since 1900. These are memoirs, diaries, and biographies. Three of these genres have received some degree of treatment in previous scholarship, with memoirs having received the highest level of systematic discussion. There has been considerable attention paid to how specific books have helped shape the reputations of their authors/subjects. This has been related to questions of official secrecy and control over documents. But there is scope to investigate how these genres have developed over time and how they have been mutually interconnected. The chapter addresses the question of why these three types of work have become an accepted and largely unquestioned, part of the British political and publishing landscape. It investigates the impact that this dominance has had on how British politics has been conceived and understood. At the surface level, it seems quite understandable that prime ministers, cabinet ministers, and a number of relatively colourful junior ministers, advisers, and backbench MPs should have dominated the publishing landscape. But at the same time, the dominance of Westminster in the priorities of publishers reinforces a particular elitist, London-centric, and largely white male-centric view of what politics is about.

In the introductory chapter, we define racial rhetorical representation and outline its significance in comparison to other forms of substantive representation. In this review, we speak about the particular meaning of this form of representation for African Americans who have historically been overlooked by political parties and rely on political actors to keep their issues on the agenda. Following this discussion, we argue that elected officials who make targeted appeals largely differ in their motivations. Some are motivated by external pressure to advance group interest, something we define as reactive racial representation. Others, we argue, are more intrinsically motivated to speak out in support of particular groups. We define this form of outreach as being proactive racial representation. We argue that the latter likely better predicts correlations with other legislative activities and will receive higher levels of approval from the targeted population. We then discuss how we use a combination of hand-coding and computer-assisted content analysis to categorize a large corpus of press releases and tweets as being centered on Black political interests or not. We use this data as the basis for much of our analysis in the manuscript. We conclude the chapter with an overview of the book and a description of several of the data sources used in this study.

This chapter examines the Italian humanist discourse on vocation in terms of two intersecting binaries: on the one hand, the competing demands of shame culture (as in Cicero’s De officiis) and guilt culture (as in Augustine’s Confessions); on the other, the interplay between individual humanists and the status and expectations of their families. The result was the first substantive articulation of the concept of secular vocation.

In Chapter 2, we rely on interviews with 29 communications directors in the U.S. House of Representatives to better understand the strategic considerations that influence their rhetorical outreach. Here we ask when and how do legislators, offices engage in proactive and reactive forms of rhetorical outreach? What shapes these decisions? And how does this vary by the race of the member of Congress? We demonstrate that proactive rhetorical outreach is a key component of most legislator offices’ communications strategies. In an effort to build favorable brands for their member, which is not only important in their efforts to appeal to their constituents but also to accrue influence in Congress, communications directors regularly engage in proactive rhetorical outreach. However, what they focus on in that outreach varies by office based on a host of variables, including legislator identity and constituency demographics. In that vein, we show that Black legislators regularly engage in proactive racial rhetorical representation and that their racial identity, along with the large presence of minority constituents in their district, help explain why. In contrast, though non-Black legislators engage in proactive rhetorical outreach, they tend to be more reactive in their racial rhetorical outreach.

Chapter 5 focuses on the notion of “common possession” (Gemeingut) in the formulas of world literature by Marx and Goethe. I suggest that their sense of collective possessiveness drew on the history of communal land ownership and its ramifications in German historical jurisprudence and Romantic philology. The chapter also claims that Goethe’s (conservative) scepticism about the liberal absolutization of private intellectual property formed an unlikely alliance with early socialist thought (Proudhon). On the other hand, the label “common good” attached to world literature in the Communist Manifesto not only resonated with Marx’s belief in the approaching dissolution of bourgeois property but also pointed at the ambivalent legal status of world-literary works before the internationalization of copyright. I argue that Karl von Savigny’s distinction between property and possession cuts across the legal history of world literature before and after the Berne Convention and signals a perpetual crisis of ownership in literary works.

Chapter 3 shows how older men, established patriarchs, wrestle with the temptation to sell their land and live lives of ‘fun’, abandoning their obligations to pass on wealth to future generations. Speaking to a rich regional literature on fatherhood and provider masculinity, it unveils a local politics of masculine responsibility, focusing on the question of land sale and fatherly obligation. Adult men from the Ituura neighbourhood who work for wages in the informal economy to support their families are shown to condemn other ‘bad’ men who sell their family land to live ‘comfortable’ lives of short-term consumption. The discourses of self-styled moral men valorise their self-disciplined control of a desire to consume wealth against the grain of immorality they perceive in the neighbourhood and beyond, especially by retaining their ancestral land. Complicating these heroic narratives of economic striving, the chapter explores the life circumstances that force land sale, as well as a growing cynicism amongst working-aged men towards the obligations of patrilineal kinship.

Chapter 6 analyses the connections between trans-imperial labor migration and Ottoman industrial and urban modernization in the nineteenth century. In a context marked by the mechanization of industrial production through technology transfer, the increasing political-economic ties between the Ottoman and British states, and the scarcity of workers with mechanical skills in Istanbul, hundreds of British industrial workers migrated to Istanbul to work mostly in the arsenal, as well as some other state factories. This chapter narrates the history of these workers and the community they established in Hasköy beginning with the mechanization efforts in the 1830s until the economic crisis in the mid-1870s. It analyses the larger context of British workers’ migration from Britain, their relations with the Ottoman state officials and local workers, and their experiences in the workplace and the city. It demonstrates how their contentious relationship and effective struggles pushed the state authorities to deploy skilled military workers, who were the products of the processes described in the previous chapter, to decrease and eliminate its dependence on them.

This chapter examines the vocational odyssey of the most famous humanist of the Italian Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti, as he struggled to pursue a literary and creative life against the background (and sometimes obstacles) of his merchant natal family. It analyzes how he dealt with his vocational decision and aspirations in a variety of genres: a comedy (Philodoxus), dinner pieces (Intercenales), a treatise on the practical and moral features of learned professions (De commodis litterarum atque incommodis); consolatory and psychological dialogues (Teogenio, Della tranquillità dell’animo); his celebrated dialogue on the family (Della famiglia), in which he simulates paternal advice from his father and various surrogate fathers from within the family; and a treatise on vocational advice to the young (De iciarchia).