Critical analyses of Australian adaptations, which celebrate adaptation as a specific creative (and critical) practice, are relatively rare, but ‘literature to screen’ discussions of various sorts have been a common feature of Australian scholarship since the 1980s. Increasingly diverse adaptation choices made by Australian film and television industries since then reflect shifting assumptions about the status of literary texts in relation to screen culture, changing practices and platforms for funding, consumption and marketing, as well as an increased demand for adaptation as a category in its own right. This chapter starts from the premise that studying Australian adaptations teaches us something about narrative journeys, national culture and Australian studies in an era of wider on-demand access to productions old and new through commercial streaming services. The chapter provides a snapshot of select Australian adaptations over the last thirty years, identifying tendencies which raise important questions about the impact of adaptation in relation to the ways contemporary Australian culture is valued and assessed. It concludes that studying Australian adaptations in the streaming era affords a nuanced and challenging perspective of changing Australian self-definition, and the multiple cultural and educational uses to which Australian adaptations are put.

The making of the Asian Australian novel is the unmaking of oppressive notions of history, subjectivity and literary form. Locating ethnic representational politics within power structures of race and nation, this chapter contends that Asian Australian identity is a site of hybrid instability realised through nonlinear forms of storytelling. The chapter examines national and diasporic paradigms across historical and contemporary trajectories of this literature: earlier Chinese Australian novels that blur boundaries between fictional and factual claims; Bildungsroman novels that trouble ethnocentric narratives of either assimilation or return; multicultural novels that unveil ongoing racism in liberal-pluralist ideals; and transnational novels that reimagine the Australian relationship with postcolonial and globalising Asian modernity. Reflecting on the limits of a critical humanist agenda, the chapter identifies an alternative paradigm of Asian Australian storytelling that employs speculative tactics to depict the land, species, climate change and Asian–Indigenous connections. This ecocritical paradigm challenges a normative ideal of the modern, autonomous and sovereign individual as one the migrant subject should integrate into, while pointing to an under-explored terrain for Asian Australian writers whose focus on diversity and justice would offer important insights into the shifting human condition.

The introduction begins by demonstrating the importance of ‘modernisation’ for left-wing debates in the second half of the twentieth century. After recapping the key staging posts of Labour’s trajectory from the 1970s to the 1990s, it then argues that existing histories obscure the diverse meanings and appeal of ‘modernisation’ through their current use of the term. I suggest that this hinders our understanding of both New Labour and many of their left-wing critics, and too readily accepts a teleological reading of history. Following a brief discussion of the method of the book, the introduction touches on the wider historical significance of this revised understanding of Labour’s ideological debates. It questions the idea of an ‘age of neoliberalism’ and introduces other themes of the late twentieth century of comparable significance to market liberalism: the challenge to the nation state from above and below; the rise of post-1968 ‘liberation movements’; deindustrialisation; and constitutional agitation. It ends by outlining the chapters.

Chapter 4 explores a more marginalised interpretation of modernisation, which foregrounded race and multiculturalism. Throughout the late twentieth century, the left wrestled with a growingly multiracial society and the rise of both the far right and a more self-confident anti-racist movement in post-colonial Britain. This profoundly shaped the Labour Party, which this chapter illustrates by exploring the 1980s ‘Black Sections’ controversy. Yet, there were only scattered arguments that linked either antiracism or multiculturalism to ‘modernisation’. This chapter explores some isolated explorations of antiracism as modernisation, notably by Ken Livingstone, and explains their intellectual context. However, it also explains why they stalled, stressing institutional and electoral factors, but also the growing discomfort among anti-racist movements with concepts like modernisation. Thus, ‘modernisation’ only became consistently linked with ‘multiculturalism’ in the 2000s, and even then, this association was hotly contested. The implications for Blair’s governments of this absence of race and multiculturalism in 1990s discourses of modernisation are explored at the end of the chapter.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

Faced with the challenge of accommodating diversity, liberal justice and human rights promise to provide an adequate normative framework for securing equal liberties and rights for all. However, despite great advancements in theory and law, discrimination endures, and these promises have not been fulfilled for enduring minorities, especially in places of ethno-national conflict. The problem this chapter aims to highlight is that while liberal democracy and human rights frameworks provide us with a desirable ideal, they fail to provide useful guidance for progress, from a situation of ethno-national conflict – which often involves political exclusion, sharp inequalities, low mutual trust, and high animosity – to more just and peaceful societies that respect the human rights of all. Self-determination is currently blocked as a legal remedy; states are reluctant to grant minority rights, especially in cases where majority–minority relations are in conflict; and scholars of equality law, asserting that any real advancement is blocked because of the individualist orientation of the law, send us back to collective measures.

The conclusion outlines a collective civic national German identity, a “New We” that includes all citizens (departing from the exclusion e.g. of visible minority citizens in the lingering ethnobiological concept). As for its second meaning, the symbolic-emotional celebration of this New We, it argues that competing proposals (Leitkultur, Heimat, patriotism) are all essentialist and lost to the far Right, despite attempts by left-wingers to redeem them through redefinition. After deliberating once more whether Germany needs a national identity at all (it does), or whether it is postnational (it isn’t), the conclusion proposes that the contents of the New We be defined democratically and within the boundaries of the constitution. The conclusion closes with a utopian vision of open borders in which mobility has become a human right and a reminder that citizenship and passports are contingent – and that those least fortunate in “the birthright lottery” (Ayelet Shachar), the paperless, periodically be amnestied and naturalized as Germans.

Siddiqui explains how British multiculturalism has ceded to a politics of resentment, fuelled by anti-immigrant and often anti-Muslim sentiment. Siddiqui draws on the writings of Georg Simmel for whom gratitude fosters emotional and social bonds, countering a narrative of resentment with one of recognition. Rather than seeking an answer in abstract theories of multiculturalism, Siddiqui argues for a refocusing on emotional well-being through gratitude rooted in empathy.

This chapter explores the transition from the politics of identity to what we define as ’the unfinished politics of race’. It moves on from the substantive accounts of specific types of mobilisations to the broader transformations that characterise the current conjuncture, in which we see a continually shifting relationship between counter publics and alternative public spheres on the one hand and the mainstream institutions of society on the other. An important theme in the chapter is an account of the changing political debates on race and multiculturalism in both the Conservative and Labour Parties. This includes a critical analysis of the arguments put forward under the labels of Red Tory and Blue Labour. We argue that these arguments, although they cover a wide range of social and political issues, have been deeply inflected by continual preoccupations about the articulation of a new form of identity politics framed by concerns about race, immigration, and the positioning of whiteness in the current period.

The question of how to make nationalism inclusive has occupied many proponents of nationalism. Will Kymlicka suggests that a “multicultural nationalism” can be one way to achieve this end. On this model, minority rights are designed to transform majority attitudes of membership in the nation by focusing on minorities’ contribution to the national community. I argue that Kymlicka is too optimistic in thinking that nationalism can underpin inclusionary imaginaries of the political community. Nationalism tends to naturalize the majority culture’s position as the entity that legitimizes the state and thereby has a privileged relation to it vis-à-vis minorities. If minority rights are to transform majority attitudes, I suggest, they are better supported by a form of “multicultural patriotism.”

Liberalism’s primary medium is that of values, principles, and laws. One of the ways to de-absolutize liberalism in relation to multiculturalism and the respectful inclusion of minorities is to recognize the sociological and normative significance of other features of social life. I do so by focusing on the significance of identity and by highlighting the normative role of dialogue in a context of cultural and value conflicts. This offers a bottom-up basis for a political theory of multiculturalism, which is not simply about trends in academic liberalism but is about claims on national citizenship and national identity by those seeking inclusion in a new sense of the national. While a focus on identity, both in terms of recognition and in terms of fostering commonality and societal unity is not sufficient, it is a necessary dimension that political theorists who frame things in terms of liberalism miss, and thereby miss both what needs to be addressed and what is needed for liberal – amongst other – values to be secured. (Nor do socialists, human rights champions, cosmopolitans, or localists.)

Many responses to the resurgence of “majority nationalism” assume that that there is nothing normatively significant to the claims of national majorities. They accordingly seek to blunt the force those claims – or simply redescribe them in ways that do not account for majority nationalists’ central commitments or concerns. The very arguments used to ground minority rights in Kymlicka’s works appear to equally justify at least some majority cultural rights. Where a group possesses majority status by reasonably benign means and yet faces threats to its culture through the operation of, for example, globalization, Kymlickean arguments for minority rights grounded in cultural vulnerability equally justify majority cultural rights. In “Nationhood, Multiculturalism, and the Ethics of Membership,” Kymlicka presents justice-based reasons to think that majority rights claims should nonetheless be neutralized. Yet his arguments assume that majority and minority rights claims will only be made within the boundaries of a nation-state and that rights recognition in those circumstances will be a “zero sum” game. This assumption too is unwarranted in a globalized world. The issue of majority rights claims is at least more complicated than what Kymlicka allows.

Multiculturalism has been turned upside down. Stated in the 1990s as a political theory and public policy of cultural minority rights, its language of cultural victimhood, oppression, and alienation has been hijacked by politicians speaking on behalf of national majorities. Some scholars have argued that liberal arguments for cultural group rights must apply to majorities as well as to minorities. I object that the notion of cultural majority rights is incoherent on empirical and conceptual grounds, and indefensible on normative grounds. The chapter suggests an alternative approach that relies on the core values of freedom, equality, and self-government. These values serve to justify cultural freedom rights for everybody, cultural rights for minorities, and powers and duties to establish a pluralistic public culture that includes all citizens. I claim that this framework covers all cultural rights that can be defended on grounds of liberal and democratic principles. There is no space left for special rights of cultural majorities.