This essay traces the relationship between colonization and academia over recent times, associating it with various intellectual moves to interrogate the hegemonic assumptions of Western culture. It argues that racial representations in literature are multifaceted and variegated, with literary studies offering opportunities to effectively demystify myths about the putative universality of American or European subject systems. This is tied to the historical specificity of particular colonial situations, with reference to the work of Nicholas Thomas, noting how one significant contribution of Australian cultural theory to literary studies has been to make debates around settler colonial paradigms more prominent. This leads into discussion of larger questions around regional autonomy, cultural appropriation and social class, with reference to the work of Walter Mignolo and Stuart Hall. It also touches upon political controversies involving with the highly problematic relationship between academic and civic authorities, a continuing power struggle that can be traced back to medieval times. The essay concludes that the etymological links between university and universality offer scope to resist local standardizations of all kinds, and in this sense a decentring of racial hierarchies runs in parallel to a decentring of geographical hierarchies.

In this chapter I read a range of Zadie Smith’s fiction and nonfiction prose to look at how Zadie Smith’s corpus testifies to an agon between the writer’s prerogative of impersonality and elective affinities and the “dark and unarguable blackness” that relentlessly attaches to raced bodies. The novels and non-fiction ask to be read not as global theory or interventionist polemic but as battlefields in themselves. Reading Zadie Smith according to the terms set up by Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall could also be crucial for decolonizing hard-bitten reading habits in the classroom that treat Black literature as interchangeable with Black culture and society. While Smith’s writing of this culture and society is immersive, she routinely and systematically problematizes the category of Blackness itself, choosing instead to imaginatively recreate the vicissitudes of identity at the intersections of race and class.

The Introduction begins by considering two dominant critical approaches to the graphic novel. While prominent authors have denied the relevance of the concept, instead preferring the term comics, many scholars have sought to align the graphic novel with prestigious literature. The chapter identifies the practical and institutional resources that the term provides, tracing the evolution of book-length comics under this mantle. Section 1.1 considers the relevance of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel for understanding the graphic novel and puts forward a new periodization of the latter. The first cycle, lasting from 1980 to 2000, centers on the book for the first time in US comics history. Starting in the early 2000s, integration into the literary marketplace initiates a second cycle that effects several important changes, from an increase in the use of color to a diversification of visual styles. Engaging with recent work in cultural sociology and political economy, Section 1.2 situates the aesthetic evolution of the graphic novel in the ongoing transformation of contemporary society.

The conclusion starts with a look back at literary critic Leslie Fiedler’s defense of comics during a nationwide campaign that led to the self-censorship of the so-called Comics Code. Half a century later, the rise of the graphic novel has dispelled most of the prejudices against comics but often at the price of an unduly narrow understanding of the medium. Critiquing the blindspots of existing scholarship on the graphic novel, the author discusses how the digital humanities can contribute to a more expansive conception of this genre. Drawing on important interventions by Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, this chapter emphasizes the need to analyze the interplay of socioeconomic factors and formal elements. Thus, the conclusion looks at the technical and methodological limitations that characterize the digital humanities at present and envisions future directions for research at the intersection of literary and visual studies.

This essay offers a genealogy of the term “racial capitalism” as it has been used to reflect upon the promise and limitations of Marxism for understanding racism. The essay departs from Cedric Robinson’s important history and theory of black radicalism, Black Marxism and the Making of the Black Radical Tradition, which first established the provenance of the idea of racial capitalism for scholarly inquiry. It proceeds by outlining a longer intellectual history of Black engagements with coeval determination, and relative strategic importance of, racial domination and economic exploitation for understanding the movements of Black history from slavery to civil rights. Beginning in the New Deal era and extending through the neoliberal era, it traces a line of thinking that extends from W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James in the 1930s, through key writings on Marxism and race by Stuart Hall in the 1970s and 1980s, and culminating in contemporary analyses of the interplay of racism and capitalism in the rise of mass incarceration in the US in work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

This concluding chapter argues that current ideas about post-narrativism and post-representationalism still build on narrativism and representationalism rather than rejecting them. They do so in particular in their radical move away from grand narratives that are associated with the construction of collective identities. Yet, as the previous chapters have shown, this position can go hand in hand with maintaining that historical writing can and should amount to an intervention in the social world and that it is meaningful for directing and informing a variety of democratic policy agendas. It is historical writing that keeps the future open and makes us suspicious of all attempts to declare an end to history. The ‘new’ histories that have been emerging over recent decades and which have been the subject of analysis in this book often see identification in the definition by Stuart Hall as the basis for their social intervention. They contributed to a growing self-reflexivity about the relationship of historical writing and collective identity formation and they have often taken their starting point from a body of highly diverse theories that have been discussed in Chapter 1 of this volume. The chapter recaps the arguments of the previous eleven chapters of the book and finishes with a reflection on how the struggle over and with history will continue in the future. Denying the existence of any whiggish progressivism, it charts the well-known fact that professional historians’ greater reluctance to commit to the construction of essentialised collective identities has gone hand in hand with the willingness of ‘amateur historiansߣ to do precisely that. This in turn has made it increasingly necessary for professional historians not to retreat to their ivory towers but engage with all essentialised forms of identity history. They need to become engaged and public historians who continue an ongoing struggle over the past in all human societies.

In the conclusion we suggest that the stakes are high - that the challenges facing universities, and especially facing disciplines that remain in isolation from each other grow greater everyday and that we are entering a period of political uncertainty about higher education. We show the way Liberal Management Education creates a solidarity and a winning alternative to the crisis we face in both higher education and increasingly in our societies as a whole.