Chapter 1 provides the theoretical premise to explain the formation of identity-based hierarchies to justify social exclusion. Bilateral relations between India and Bangladesh and differential neoliberalism in the two countries reproduce a social hierarchy that serves to socially exclude Bengali Muslims. This exclusion, the chapter contends, can be explained by analyzing how neoliberal ideas shape identity markers – religion, language and culture, geographical importance, and their intersection – which in turn affect biopolitics. In tandem with the fact that Bengali Muslims share cross-border ethnic ties with the majority of Bangladeshis, the minority-migrant complex turns the Bengali Muslim into a group that can be strategically excluded, included, scapegoated, or rendered invisible. In turn, it reveals the contradictions in society: scapegoating is an inward-looking, nationalist, and state-centric strategy because it is geared towards maintaining government control and popularity (albeit based on a constructed foreign threat); neoliberal policies are outward-looking and "decentralized" because of the rhetoric of open markets and individual freedom. Their easy co-existence effectively privatize violence, as emboldened non-state actors turn into purveyors of oppression in response to neoliberal shifts.

Law enforcement is increasingly reliant on technology to automate encounters with the public, identify persons to be targeted for further scrutiny, and document interpersonal interactions. As a result, public contacts with police are transitioning from traditional interpersonal interactions to interactions that are increasingly technologically mediated. This chapter reflects on that transition and speculates on the ways in which police–community relations, particularly relations with some racial minority communities, may be affected by this transition. A central argument in favor of technologically mediated law enforcement (e.g., automated license plate readers, facial recognition software, body-worn cameras) is that this new style of policing has the ability to ensure equal protection under the law, enhancing police legitimacy, and mending poor community–police relations. Some see the introduction of technology into law enforcement encounters as a solution to resolving mistrust associated with fractured relations between police and the communities that they serve, particularly for some racial minority communities.

The background on how the book came to be is delineated with reference to its general structure and key themes, following five key thoroughfares that anchor distinct parts of New Orleans – Royal Street, St. Claude Avenue, Esplanade Avenue, Basin Street, and St.Charles Avenue – with a final chapter on the outskirts of the city.

The literary history of Royal Street in New Orleans begins with the folktales of the flatboatmen, the songs of the enslaved trafficked through the city, and the Afro-Creole poets of the 1840s–1860s. It then continues in the late nineteenth century with major, national voices on the subject of the city (Cable, Hearn, King, Davis), and the arrival of O. Henry at the turn of the century. It then flowered again in the 1920s with the bohemian circle around Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner, with the emergence of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams in the 1940s, and then yet again with the various 1960s undergrounds of John Rechy, Robert Stone, The Outsider Magazine, and organized crime figures implicated in the Kennedy assassination. There then followed in the 1970s and 80s a series of important books rooted in a mythological vision of the area by Ishmael Reed, Tom Robbins, Anne Rice, Harry Crews, Dalt Wonk, and Paula Fox. The neighborhood’s most recent literary masterpiece appeared in 2003 in Valerie Martin’s Property. Much of the major writing of this neighborhood shares an interest in masks – identities concealed, divided, fabricated, transformed, or sustained against the odds in both stories and story-telling.

Chapter 5 describes a phenomenon only found in the Sahara known as sell, or bloodsucking and the extraction of essential life forces, arguing that accusations of sell and their related events thus offer an opportunity to view local conceptions of social identity and related fears about shifts in hierarchy, old hostilities between lineages, as well as understandings of the nature of health and illness. While Arabic sources document the existence of bloodsucking at least as early as the fifteenth-century, the colonial archive provides the most concentrated number of records that demonstrate how bloodsucking was a lived and feared reality for desert communities during the colonial period. From these Saharan sources, a fuller understanding emerges of how desert communities envisioned the political and spiritual forces of their social worlds during periods of famine, economic stagnation, and domestic tension. Both the accusation of sell and the l’ḥjāb used to counter it signal the contestation of a society’s status quo.

Chapter 3 shifts the focus to the US East Coast. Roy Harris was one of several young Americans who studied composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger in the 1920s; Symphony 1933 was his breakthrough work after returning home. Commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky, who anecdotally asked for a ‘big symphony from the West’, Symphony 1933 teases out the relationships between those expansionist discourses associated with the symphony indicated by Paul Bekker (1918), liberal ideology, and the imagined spaces of the American West. Examining the reception of Symphony 1933 and its music, the chapter raises questions about how the discourse around Harris’s symphony and liberalism’s spatial narratives colluded in establishing the political hegemony of white Americans and the supposed naturalness of their right to occupy the West, an acute anxiety given the disenfranchisement of white working-class Americans during the economic collapse of the early 1930s.

This chapter argues that people in what became the French colonial territory of Mauritania marshalled l’ḥjāb in their opposition to colonization and how French perceptions of l’ḥjāb shaped their response to that opposition. It covers the first half of the colonial period from c.1900 when the French formally declared Mauritania a colonial military territory into the 1930s when France considered itself in military and administrative control of the colony. The chapter focuses on this period when colonizers first deployed a strategy of collaboration with certain religious leaders and then rapidly shifted to a strategy that restricted the physical movements of the men they called marabouts. These new restrictions on the movement and activity of purveyors of Islamic learning and its sciences targeted l’ḥjāb as a Mauritania-specific factor in broader colonial anxiety over Islam. It is during this period from 1900–1935 that the French established the policies that would directly shape their engagement with l’ḥjāb and, via socioeconomic changes that resulted from those policies, indirectly shape how people of Mauritania relied on l’ḥjāb and its practitioners.

This chapter addresses the history of the Ahl Guennar, a confederation of families known for their mastery of l’ḥjāb, whose members are dispersed among several villages just north of the Senegal River. The Ahl Guennar’s ambiguous racial identity, their shifting religious and occupational affiliations, their secrecy and enigmatic reputation, and their long history in the region make them a compelling case study for the role of Islamic esoteric knowledge in Mauritania’s mercurial political and cultural environment. Claiming descent from a well-known religious figure and a miraculous origin story for their principal village, the Ahl Guennar established themselves by the seventeenth-century learning and teaching the Qur’ān and its sciences and carving out an exclusive space for themselves in the political dynamics of the Gebla, or southwestern region of Mauritania. This chapter deals with the long-term history of the family to better understand how they deploy these stories to claim religious and social roles in the region and to illustrate how Islamic knowledge is transmitted and the ways these Muslim mediators of the spiritual and material worlds depended upon this knowledge to thrive.

Part introduction to the frame around 1933, part initial case study, the first chapter introduces Kurt Weill’s Symphony No. 2, the symphony-in-progress he carried in his suitcase as he escaped Nazi Berlin for exile in Paris in March 1933. The chapter explores its 1934 premiere in Amsterdam, where critics took issue with both the popular-sounding music and with Weill himself – neither seeming suitable for the symphonic genre – to introduce the book’s central concerns: how, at this uncertain and turbulent political moment, the specific cultural anxieties that emerge around symphonies can generate insights into how people thought about both subjectivity and about political and aesthetic notions of space. If previous scholarship on the genre has largely been wedded to nation-states and grand political narratives, this chapter instead argues for a transnational approach and lays out the symphonic genre’s long history of entanglement with Germanic philosophies of subjectivity and space, from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Paul Bekker.

This chapter looks at how and why Churchill has become such a divisive figure. It opens with a description of recent debates in the public discourse and on social media. It then briefly discuses Churchill’s reputation during his lifetime before recounting the role that he played in shaping his own legacy through his words, written and spoken, and through the creation of his archive and official biography. The authors then examine the long and complex historiography of Churchill, highlighting some of the most significant challenges to the dominant Churchillian narrative. Particular attention is paid to the more recent politicising of Churchill as a result of debates over Brexit, empire and race.

Alighting briefly once again on Weill’s Symphony No. 2 from the book’s opening, and then turning to consider Florence Price’s Symphony in E minor as a closing case study, Chapter 6 pivots between the early 1930s and the present day to consider the legacies and twentieth-century historiography of the symphonies in the book – their absences and recoveries – and the remarkable persistence of the symphonic genre in the mechanisms of how cultural and political agency is conferred to the present day. The poor reception of Weill’s New York premiere in 1934 comes under examination in light of the discussion in the intervening chapters, raising the question of why, for that time and place, Weill was the wrong kind of symphonist. Then, the chapter addresses the contemporary revival of Price’s symphony in the early 2020s, and it suggests the capacity of symphonies from the tumultuous years around 1933 to invigorate a differently dynamic symphonic landscape and a differently dynamic landscape of selfhood.

The British Empire provided the context in which both Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt came to maturity and defined and aggravated their differences as national leaders. The chapter begins by comparing the shared beliefs and values of Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt on empire and race before showing how Franklin Roosevelt emerged from his cousin’s shadow to develop a hostility towards the British Empire inspired by genuine idealism as well as calculating pragmatism. It documents the tension between Churchill’s imperialism and his appreciation that American participation in the war was the key to victory, examining the differences between the two leaders before looking at their wartime relationship through the lens of their very different responses to events in the British Empire, especially in India. Churchill’s dispute with Roosevelt on the subject of the British Empire went to the heart of the relationship between a Democrat president who wanted to create a new world order imbued with American values and a Conservative prime minister who aimed to maintain the old world in all its glory. This disjunction threatened the stability of the wartime alliance.

The chapter sees India as a stain on Churchill’s reputation. As a young officer, Churchill spent twenty-two months in India, representing his longest concentrated stay outside of Britain, but his prejudice against Anglo-Indians meant that he engaged only with the elites of British India and remained isolated. The Empire and its permanence became the bedrock of a deep-seated conviction just at the time of India’s nationalist upsurge for self-rule and independence. He condemned the Amritsar massacre but thereafter opposed all ideas for Indian political evolution. The fact that he held no responsibility for India affairs apart from May 1940 to July 1945 did not stop him speaking about the subcontinent. His campaign against the India Act of 1935 was conducted at enormous political cost to himself and left the leaders of the Indian independence movement embittered, contributing to Hindu–Muslim polarisation. During the Second World War Churchill manipulated Britain’s response to the Indian independence movement, titling policy in favour of Jinnah and the creation of Pakistan. His response to the Bengal Famine has to be framed in terms of race.