The ‘logic’ of charity in modern Britain has been understood as ‘complex’ and ‘varied’: ‘a loose and baggy monster’. Charity after Empire takes this complexity as the basis for a new interpretation. First, the indeterminacy of the role and function of charity lay behind its popularity and growth. With no fixed notions of what they should be or what they should do, charities and NGOs have expanded because they have been many things to many people. Second, the messy practices of aid meant success could always be claimed amidst uncertain objectives and outcomes, triggering further expansion. Third, just as charity was welcomed as a solution to poverty overseas, its scope and potential were contained by powerful political actors who restricted its campaigning and advocacy work. Fourth, racial injustice, especially apartheid, shaped not only humanitarianism overseas but also the domestic governance of charity in Britain. It all resulted not only in the massive expansion of charity but also limitations placed on its role and remit.

Chapter 4 shows how, as the Wales novel congealed into a stable genre, it began to confront the knotty problem of race. The notorious economic underdevelopment of Wales posed a problem to Scottish Enlightenment-inspired anthropologists who cast climate and religion as the determinants of standardized, stadial socioeconomic progress. Such theories failed to account for the wealth gap between Wales and England, since Wales’s climate was mostly identical to England’s and Wales had come to be understood as the heartland of British Protestantism. As authors struggled to explain Welsh impoverishment, they became increasingly willing to use race to figure the Welsh as different from Anglo-Britons in kind, rather than in degree of social development. Some authors contended that the Welsh were “negroes,” “savages,” and “men of copper,” who deviated from a phenotypically white Britishness, while others insisted they were the progenitors of a pure race destined to rule the world.

That the Declaration of Independence could be considered from the perspective of rhetoric might seem rather obvious, if not downright self-evident. Even so, appreciating how Jefferson thought about language not as an abstract concept but as a lived and material practice can help us appreciate the text of the Declaration from different perspectives. The text is shot through with the histories of race, nation, empire, and belonging that characterized the ideology of American revolutionary republicanism, and with Jefferson’s thinking about these forces and his own anxious place in them. In fact, despite and perhaps even in part because of his own difficulties with public speaking, Jefferson thought about the ability to access and marshal rhetorical exemplars and put them to use in legal and political argument as an elemental part of what it meant to be an effective citizen. His thinking about material rhetoric, about the absorption of what one read through notes, commentary, and commonplace books, turns out to be a critical component of how he thought about the legitimacy of the American project and of how he framed that project in successive drafts of the Declaration itself.

Chapter 5 explores the conspicuous absence of a Romantic Welsh national novel patterned after the fictions of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott. Reading over a dozen “failed” attempts at producing such books, the chapter argues that the unique position of Wales did not furnish it with the materials necessary for a conventional bardic nationalist novel. Edgeworth’s and Scott’s spectacular commodification of national cultural difference could not be made to work in the Welsh case. Where Edgeworth’s Irish and Scott’s Scottish trade politically independent but doomed identities for a cultural nationalism that is, above all, reconcilable with a capacious imperial Britishness, the Welsh had no such option, since Welshness was and had been synonymous with (ancient) Britishness for centuries. What was at stake in Welsh national fictions was instead the definition of Britishness itself.

This chapter considers the ambiguous utopian impulses of literary, filmic, and television works published and produced in the 1970s. Drawing on the concept of post-imperial melancholy, the chapter traces the utopian contours of these texts’ forceful, often shocking, critique of British imperial nostalgia. It focuses on sub-genres that emerged during this significant decade, including the British alternate history, the dystopia, and reworkings of the classical literary utopia, with reference to writers such as Daphne Du Maurier, Len Deighton, Anthony Burgess, Emma Tennant, Angela Carter, and J. G. Ballard. These three genres, the chapter argues, critically interrogate the utopian impulse in the 1970s and its possible instantiations in national and transnational imagined communities, as well as the built environment in which the modernity of these communities is expressed. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, identifying how this iconic 1970s punk film reframes the classical narrative structure of literary utopias.

This chapter examines the ‘peculiar’ utopian temporality of the contemporary moment as expressed in the fictional works of three Black British female writers: Queenie (2019), by Candace Carty-Williams, Swing Time (2016) by Zadie Smith, and Girl, Woman, Other (2019) by Bernadine Evaristo. The chapter argues that these novels represent a particular incarnation of utopian realism. This names a strong commitment in contemporary British fiction to articulating post-racial futures. In utopian realist texts, writers use realism not to convey mimetic depictions of the present here and now but, rather, to convince readers of the viability of alternative, transformed futures. Utopian realists such as Candace Carty-Williams, Zadie Smith, Bernadine Evaristo, Monica Ali, and Diana Evans foreground a relationship between utopian thinking and models drawn from personal and historic experience. Like design fictions, the term given for fictional narratives used by designers of prototype products and technologies to help imagine their future use, these texts offer readers identifiable utopian alternatives to contemporary Britain. Shaped in relation to the long history of Black experience in the United Kingdom, as well as gender and queerness, these novels reveal the need to consider the future not as a speculative possibility but a realisable plan for how we might live.

This chapter explores works by two contemporary London-based Black British playwrights who also direct, produce, and perform: debbie tucker green and Mojisola Adebayo. Examining plays produced and performed between 2005 and 2019, the chapter suggests that both women create distinctive work that combines singular dramaturgy with transformative politics, shifting the framing of spectatorial perspective. They are also known for making innovative, experimental, and poetical work at the intersection of aesthetics and politics. The chapter traces the Blochian utopian possibility of ‘something’s missing’ (etwas fehlt) in tucker green’s dramaturgy of refusal. In her plays, the chapter suggests, we can identify what Herbert Marcuse’s called ‘the Great Refusal’, which develops a utopian sensibility via negation. Frequently working class, Black, and female, tucker green’s belligerent characters reveal to audiences what is missing in their difficult lives, how everything should be different in Britain. In Adebayo’s work, forged in the community-led Black Mime Theatre in the 1990s, utopian possibility forms part of the affective spectatorial encounter with her theatre. Whilst Adebayo’s plays are less abrasive, they similarly highlight what is missing. The transformative energy of her dramaturgy can be seen in utopian foretastes of alternative lives, in which Black, queer, and de-colonial modes of intersubjectivity become possible.

Queer and trans of color critique engages the ways sexuality and gender themselves gain meaning in the context of systems of racial differentiation and, reciprocally, how struggles for justice, abolition, freedom, and decolonization must attend to sexuality and gender as both vectors of domination and sites of liberatory imagination and expression. This chapter considers how attributions of savagery, criminality, and inassimilable alienness to racialized populations in the United States are shaped by narratives of these groups’ inability to enact proper gender and sexuality. The chapter further considers how queer and trans of color critique addresses the specificities in how particular racialized groups are defined through systems of sexual and gender normativity and how they have engaged those systems in multidimensional ways, attending to queer and trans work in Black studies, Latinx studies, Asian American studies, and Indigenous studies. It traces differences and disagreements within those fields and tracks dialogues among/across them.

This chapter focuses on the work of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It offers an account of the major strands of their thinking, how their work evolved over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the ways some important formulations in queer and trans studies can be traced directly or indirectly back to these writers. Sedgwick engages with the entangled relations between sexuality, knowledge, and feeling and Butler with the coconstitutive connections among gender, sexuality, and notions of embodiment. Butler’s and Sedgwick’s critiques of what were commonsensical ideas about gender and sexuality still raise powerful questions about bodies, identity, and collective movements, even as later scholarship puts pressure on the implicit frameworks that shape how those questions are posed and addressed in their work.

The chapter focuses on the experiences and representations of the shipboard community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to explore the changes in the imagining of ‘people’ and questions of individual and collective identity. By closely reading the novels by Joseph Conrad, James Hanley, and B. Traven, alongside the theoretical works of Sigmund Freud, Gustave Le Bon, and Hannah Arendt, it argues how fictional form diagnoses and dramatises with singular power the gradual move from Victorian ideas of the ‘crowd’ to an interwar imagining of peoples’ history and the language of rights. In the process, the chapter addresses a range of issues, from questions of race, class, and the body to the condition of statelessness and the growth of proletarian consciousness, which push the maritime novel in new directions.

This chapter concentrates on a range of literary and extra-literary sources – James Grainger’s georgic poem The Sugar-Cane (1764), Maria Edgeworth’s short story ‘The Grateful Negro’ (1802), and judicial testimonies of enslaved rebels – to examine how disenfranchised Africans conducted politics in the revolutionary Atlantic. Taking the controversy over the Registry Bill as a pivotal moment between the founding of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1787) and emancipation (1838), it investigates how enslaved people aspired for what Steven Hahn has termed ‘socially meaningful power’. The term ‘people’ in current work on political democracy is largely synonymous with the inhabitants of the nation-state. As members of the diaspora, exiled from their native lands, enslaved Caribbeans were stateless people who lived in the extraterritorial space of the colony. Yet they waged struggles for meaningful control over their lives and labour, not to mention for their subjecthood.

This chapter asks how Mexicans remembered the histories of slavery, abolition, and Afro-descendants once independence was achieved, slavery abolished, and calidad classifications prohibited by law. Through an examination of the Mexican press between 1821 and 1860, this work traces the creation of historical narratives that downplayed the importance of slavery for Mexican history, while at the same time used the figure of Afro-Mexicans to cement different political projects. The purpose of this chapter, then, is to document that these subjects remained being part of Mexican public life through the press. More than restoring these questions’ visibility in Mexican history, the relevance of an analysis such as this rests on exposing the political uses and rhetorical power these themes had during that period. Slavery, abolition, and Afro-Mexicans’ presence in the country were points of reference in the creation of national identities and historical narratives that still bear weight in modern Mexican society.

This chapter examines the case of María Geronima, an Iberian-born, free-Black woman who lived in Cartagena, Veracruz, and Mexico City before she was exiled to Cuba in 1636. In emphasizing Geronima’s remarkable mobility, the chapter asks how inchoate notions of caste, race, and community varied and transformed across space in the early modern world. In Geronima’s exile from New Spain, the chapter ultimately asks whether and how scholars can apply Mexico’s archival richness—as seen in cases such as Geronima’s—to understand the evolution and function of status elsewhere in the Atlantic world.

While much has been written about race, colonization, and anticolonialism in fin-de-siècle Irish gothic works such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), this chapter focuses particular attention on Romantic-era Irish gothic fiction’s engagements with empire and the imperialized world. Written in the context of an increasingly expansive, globalized literary marketplace, the works assessed here – including Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), Catherine Cuthbertson’s Romance of the Pyrenees (1803), the anonymous Amasina; or the American Foundling (1804), and Henrietta Rouvière Mosse’s Arrivals from India (1812) – provide an instructive example of Irish writers’ deft manipulation of systems of global economy to debate and contest questions of empire, relative civilization/barbarity, and ethnographies of race. They also point to the formal evolution of Irish gothic encouraged and enabled by writers’ responses to the economic and material realities of empire. Keenly aware of their global readership and their novels’ status as commodities, these writers invoke and reshape the gothic to think about the nature of authorship itself. Their works thus invite a reconsideration of the accepted makeup and characteristics of Romantic gothic, at the same time as they insist on an expansion of traditional canons of gothic and Irish gothic literature.