To read Lear as connected to Union debates is not reductively topical: the story of Leir belongs to the Galfridian history on which England’s British claims were founded. Moreover, as a Senecan Oedipal tragedy, Shakespeare’s Lear responds to the ‘Oedipal Britain’ found in Elizabethan tragedies such as Gorboduc, Jocasta and The Misfortunes of Arthur. These are national tragedies that lament the natio/nation as lost place of origin, a mother destroyed by her children. Shakespeare’s Lear resists this identification. In Shakespeare’s Lear, the ostentatiously childless deaths of Goneril and Regan destroy the Galfridian prophetic future, while the doubling of Oedipus and Antigone in Lear/Cordelia and Gloucester/Edgar thoroughly ironises and makes impossible any tragic identification of nation and maternal birthplace. In consigning the futureless ‘state’ to Albany and Edgar, icons, respectively, of Scottish enmity and English sea-sovereignty, Shakespeare compounds the tragedy’s ironic relation to contemporary naturalisation debates.

This chapter explores how postcolonial reformers attempted to reconcile Brazil’s dependence on slavery and the slave trade within a nation-building project that emphasized it as an empire of law, order, and liberal citizenship. It discusses Brazil’s transition from a colony to a postcolonial nation, and analyzes the antislavery ideas that informed the building of the penitentiary in Rio as a crucible for modernizing the empire. By 1831, these postcolonial reformers converged around a philanthropic organization called the Sociedade Defensora da Liberdade e Independencia Nacional, whose objective was to modernize Brazil’s institution from colony to nation. The organization targeted abolition of the slave trade to Brazil and reform of its criminal justice system as two of its main objectives to anchor the empire on the path to progress, order, and economic prosperity. Analyzing the postcolonial debates on the abolition of the slave trade, legal reforms, and citizenship demonstrates that they were fundamental to the adoption of the penitentiary. Social reformers and antislavery advocates viewed the prohibition of the traffic as significant in resolving debates about race, nation, and citizenship in postindependence Brazil.

The concept of nation in the United Kingdom is famously ambiguous. It has no juridical value but is a central element in constitutional debates. It can refer to either the whole state or to one of its component parts, England, Scotland, Wales and a part of Ireland. The name of the state, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, lacks a corresponding adjective; as Richard Rose remarks, ‘No one speaks of the “Ukes” as a nation’.1

The constitutional union between England and Scotland created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and is central to our understanding of the nature of the British state today. It was a union long in the making, unveiling itself in two significant moments one century apart: the union of crowns in 1603 and of parliaments in 1707. These moments of union, which were indeed constitutional rather than merely political in nature, both signalled and helped to maintain over the following centuries, albeit in subtle ways, plural patterns of nationhood beneath the veneer of unitary statehood. The United Kingdom, which also includes Northern Ireland, that troubled relic of the Acts of Union with Ireland of 1801, has in recent times been called plurinational;1 but this is no more than a recognition of the plural national fact that has characterised the social nature of the state from its inception, albeit that the political salience of its multinational character has only in recent times come to the fore.

Drawing on examples from real life as well as fictional representations in literature, cinema, theatre, television and radio, this chapter interrogates the relationship of queerness to the British nation from the Great War to the present. Beginning with Rose Allatini’s 1918 novel Despised and Rejected, the first part documents how and why queers were framed as a suspect minority, a danger to the nation. The second part largely draws on the deliberations of the Wolfenden Committee in the 1950s in explaining why a shift towards a limited tolerance for discreet, respectable, ‘genuine’ homosexuals began to take place. The final part traces the proliferation of queer-themed representations in recent decades alongside the rise of gay liberation and the battle over gay civil liberties. It concludes that queers in Britain have made undeniable progress, but at the cost of co-option for a homonational consensus.

In 2007, Syrine Hout argued that the Arab Australian author Jad El Hage’s The Last Migration: A Novel of Diaspora and Love (2002) was the first Lebanese and, by extension, Arab, diaspora novel. Hout’s claim suggests that any writing by Arab Australians that preceded El Hage’s novel was beyond the bounds of diasporic literature. Her argument implies historical progression where migrant writers start as unsettled exiles and evolve into settled diasporic writers. The irony in the Australian context is that very few Arab Australian novels exist prior to 2002, meaning that if Hout’s claim is correct, the trajectory that The Last Migration benefited from must have come from its interaction with anglophone Arab writing being shaped elsewhere, where longer histories exist, and alongside other migrant writing in Australia. This chapter focuses on a range of Arab Australian novels to reveal how and in what ways this writing is deeply Australian while simultaneously embedded in a diasporic writerly milieu. It does so by contextualising these novels within diasporic and nationalist frameworks to illustrate how such texts do not easily fit the kind of literary categorisations posited by Hout.

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.

Chapter 1 surveys the current historiography of anti-colonial self-determination in the twentieth century. It highlights how historians have continued to view anti-colonial self-determination in terms of state-based political representation.

This chapter explores how ‘globalisation’ became a common frame of reference about the ‘modern world’ and the rise and fall of both nationalist and pan-European socialist responses. It is widely recognised that the ‘discourse of globalisation’ was a lynchpin of New Labour’s ‘modernisation’, and some scholars also argue that it drove the party’s capitulation to ‘Thatcherism’. However, this chapter reconstructs an overlooked source of the idea of globalisation in Labour: the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES), which underpinned the 1983 manifesto. It traces how, from the 1970s, Labour policymakers diagnosed a powerful new force – ‘multinational’ production and finance – which placed novel constraints on the socialist state. Over the 1980s, these policymakers went from attempting to reassert the British state’s sovereignty to trying to transcend it through European integration. The AES collapsed after the 1983 electoral catastrophe, while Eurosocialism failed to decisively shape Labour. Yet, these ideas show that the spreading idea of ‘globalisation’ as an unavoidable feature of modernity had many parents in Labour and originated from the party’s left as well as its right.

In Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, the narrator, Etsuko, looks out at the view of the surrounding countryside from her English garden and comments ‘I always think it’s so truly like England out here’. The phrase ‘truly like’ emphasizes a central topic in Ishiguro’s work: the question of England, or of what it is ‘truly like’ that is evoked especially in The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans, Never Let Me Go, and The Buried Giant. Such novels underscore the idea that human communities are permanent only in their heterogeneity and instability, in their fragile and conflicted status, and in the varied and ever-changing terms in which they talk to themselves about themselves. Ishiguro’s novels repeatedly return to and continually reinvent forms of Englishness because they recognize that England is an invention, a phantasm that can therefore only be ‘truly like’ itself, not itself. His narratives are not only about the exilic, ungrounded condition of the immigrant or of the cultural stranger within a society, but also (and therefore) about the ersatz, ungrounded condition of us all.

When Never Let Me Go was published in 2005, Ishiguro indicated that he ‘remain[ed] fascinated by memory’, and that his next challenge was to examine the themes of national memory and forgetting. The Buried Giant, published in 2015, represents Ishiguro’s unique meditations on collective memory, understanding, and the complexities of forgetting. Utilizing a third-person narrative voice, Ishiguro orchestrates a post-Arthurian landscape of buried slaughter and collective amnesia, whilst engaging in a critical enquiry into the nature of shared memories in relationships. This chapter will begin by considering Ishiguro’s memory work in his earlier novels, before an investigation into the fallibility of memory and understanding precipitated by the enigmatic mist. This is followed by an exploration of the question of culpability and the complexities of collective memory. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the figure of the boatman, the island of forgetting, and the implications of an enforced forgetting.

Through his first four decades, Giovanni Amendola strode energetically down the Italian road to liberalism. From his origins in an uncelebrated part of Campania, from a family clinging to the lowest rungs of the middle class, he moved determinedly up and up. En route, there were numerous staging posts: moderate socialism, religion of great variety (but never Catholicism), marriage to a ‘new woman’ from the Romanov empire, pure philosophy, political philosophy, academic life, political journalism, war service with promotion in his country’s officer corps, and then, in November 1919, election to the Chamber of Deputies for one of the seats in the College of Salerno. That first direct step towards political power was followed speedily by appointment to what was the outer cabinet, but with the crucial post-war task of helping to manage Italy’s finances. Within the framework of Italian liberalism, as set in place by the Risorgimento, other young men also emerged into political prominence. But few ranged quite was widely as young Giovanni Amendola.

Chapter 5 draws on notarial records and census reports (padrones) to track the ethnic language used to describe Afro-descended residents of Veracruz and other Gulf Coast cities and towns. Comparing this data to published studies of other Mexican and Caribbean areas, I argue distinctive African ethnic labels retained meaning in coastal communities longer than they did in the Mexican interior, reflecting patterns of usage in the Caribbean. This was true not only among individuals, but collectively in the form of confraternities. As late as 1667, at least five confraternities in Veracruz continued to use language of African ethnicity, while confraternities elsewhere in Mexico had long since abandoned ethnic language. The final section of the chapter uses the admissions records of the Hospital Nuestra Señora de Loreto to examine the size and shape of Veracruz’s Caribbean-born population. Because the records include birthplace information for the hospital’s predominantly free-black women who were its patients between 1684 and 1695, they allow us to understand more tangibly the intersections of Mexican-Caribbean networks and ethnic labeling.