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This book investigates the lives and stories of queer Maghrebi and Maghrebi French men who moved to or grew up in contemporary France. It combines original French language data from my ethnographic fieldwork in France with a wide array of recent narratives and cultural productions including performance art and photography, films, novels, autobiographies, published letters, and other first-person essays to investigate how these queer men living in France and the diaspora stake claims to time and space, construct kinship, and imagine their own future. By closely examining empirical evidence from the lived experiences of these queer Maghrebi French-speakers, this book presents a variety of paths available to these men who articulate and pioneer their own sexual difference within their families of origin and contemporary French society. These sexual minorities of North African origin may explain their homosexuality in terms of a “modern coming out” narrative when living in France. Nevertheless, they are able to negotiate cultural hybridity and flexible language, temporalities, and filiations, that combine elements from a variety of discourses on family, honor, face-saving, the symbolic order of gender differences, gender equality, as well as the western and largely neoliberal constructs of individualism and sexual autonomy.

In nineteenth-century Britain few cities could rival Liverpool for recorded drunkenness. Civic pride at Liverpool’s imperial influence was undercut by anxieties about social problems that could all be connected to alcohol, from sectarian unrest and prostitution in the city’s streets to child neglect and excess mortality in its slums. These dangers, heightened in Liverpool by the apparent connections between the drink trade and the city’s civic elite, marked urban living and made alcohol a pressing political issue. As a temperance movement emerged to tackle the dangers of drink, campaigners challenged policy makers to re-imagine the acceptable reach of government. While national leaders often failed to agree on what was practically and philosophically palatable, social reformers in Liverpool focused on the system that licensed the sale of drink in the city’s pubs and beerhouses. By reforming licensing, they would later boast, Liverpool had tackled its reputation as the drunkenness capital of England. The Licensed City reveals just how battles over booze have made the modern city. As such, it confronts whether licensing is equipped to regulate today’s problem drinking.

This is the first book to explore Irish women’s novels and the representation of Paris, which draws these writers into a recognizably European literary tradition. By reasserting the centrality of Paris, this book draws connections between Irish women writers and European writers, forging new points of contact between Irish literature and canonical figures like Goethe, Balzac, and Zola through the shared interest in the socio-economic development of modernity. The European Metropolis not only expands the map of Irish Studies, but also to expand the canon of and the critical framework in which scholars situate these novels. Moreover, this book expands our critical understanding of the urban and female spheres of the modern metropolis.

"The Colonial Fortune" highlights the features of a paracolonial aesthetics emanating from a significant body of contemporary Hexagonal and non-metropolitan texts. Authored by writers who are either directly involved in the debate about the colonial past and its remanence (J. M. G. Le Clézio, Paule Constant, Édouard Glissant, Tierno Monénembo, Marie NDiaye, and Leïla Sebbar) or who do not overtly manifest such concerns (Stéphane Audeguy, Marie Darrieussecq, Régis Jauffret, Pierre Michon, and Claude Simon), these works create a shared imaginary space permeated by the symbolic, rhetorical, and conceptual presence of colonialism in our postcolonial era. The paracolonial describes the phenomena of revival, resurgence, remanence, and residue – in other words, the permanence of the colonial in contemporary imagination. It also addresses the re-imagining, revisiting, and recasting of the colonial in current works of literature (fiction, autobiography, and essay). The idea of the colonial fortune emerges as an interface between our era’s concerns with issues of fate, economics, legacy, and debt stemming from the understudied persistence of the colonial in today’s political and cultural conversation, and literature’s ways of making sense of them both sensorially and sensibly.

For a period spanning two centuries the sectarian (‘orange’ versus ‘green’) divide in Liverpool soured relations between its residents. Indeed, the city’s political representatives were often elected on the basis of their ethno-religious pedigree and street clashes, particularly on the twelfth of July, were commonplace. Politics continued to be influenced by religion until the mid-1970s. Weakening sectarianism, in the limited existing studies, is attributed largely to post-war slum clearance, but this book asserts that causality is much more complex. There are a range of factors that have contributed to the decline. As this book demonstrates, the downfall of sectarianism coincided with the creation of a collective identity; an identity based not on ethno-religious affiliations, but on a commonality, an acknowledgment that principles which united were more significant than factors which divided. Importantly, the success of the city’s two football teams, Everton FC and Liverpool FC, gave the city a new focus based upon a healthy sporting rivalry rather than sectarian vehemence. A complex interplay of secularism and ecumenism, the economic misfortunes of Liverpool and their political impact in terms of class politics, the growth of a collective city identity and the omnipotence of (non-religiously derived) football affiliations combined to diminish Liverpool’s once acute sectarian fault-line. This book examines how and why.

Between Britain’s imperial victory in the Second World War and its introduction of race-based immigration restriction ‘at home,’ London’s relationship with its burgeoning West Indian settler community was a cauldron of apprehension, optimism, ignorance, and curiosity. The West Indian Generation revisits this not-quite-postcolonial moment through the careers of a unique generation of West Indian (British Caribbean) artists that included actors Earl Cameron, Edric Connor, Pearl Connor, Cy Grant, Ronald Moody, Barry and Lloyd Reckord, and calypso greats Lord Beginner and Lord Kitchener. Colonial subjects turned British citizens, they tested the parameters of cultural belonging through their work. Drawing upon familiar and neglected artefacts from London’s cultural archives, Amanda Bidnall sketches the feathery roots of this community as it was both nurtured and inhibited by metropolitan institutions and producers hoping variously to promote imperial solidarity, educate mainstream audiences, and sensationalize racial conflict. Upon a shared foundation of language, education, and middle-class values, a fascinating collaboration took place between popular West Indian artists and cultural authorities like the Royal Court Theatre, the Rank Organisation, and the BBC. By analyzing the potential—and limits—of this collaboration, Bidnall demonstrates the mainstream influence and perceptive politics of pioneering West Indian artists. Their ambivalent and complicated reception by the British government, media, and populace draws a tangled picture of postwar national belonging. The West Indian Generation is necessary reading for anyone interested in the cultural ramifications of the end of empire, New Commonwealth migration, and the production of Black Britain.

The First World War has often suffered from comparison to the Second, in terms of both public interest and the significance ascribed to it by scholars in the shaping of modern Britain. This is especially so for the relationship between the Left and these two wars. For the Left, the Second World War can be seen as a time of triumph: a united stand against fascism followed by a landslide election win and a radical, reforming Labour government. The First World War is more complex. Given the gratuitous cost in lives, the failure of a ‘fit country for heroes to live in’ to materialise, the deep recessions and unemployment of the inter-war years, and the botched peace settlements which served only to precipitate another war, the Left has tended to view the conflict as an unmitigated disaster and unpardonable waste. This has led to a tendency on the Left to see the later conflict as the ‘good’ war, fought against an obvious evil, and the earlier conflict as an imperialist blunder; the result of backroom scheming, secret pacts and a thirst for colonies. This book to moves away from a concentration on machinations at the elite levels of the labour movement, on events inside Parliament and intellectual developments; there is a focus on less well-visited material. This book argues that labour patriotism characterised the left’s stance on the First World War, the anti-war stance was marginalised, and this patriotism both held the labour movement together and ensured greater electoral success after 1918.

This is the first English translation of an important document in the history of the black presence in Germany and Europe: the autobiography of Theodor Michael. Theodor Michael is the last surviving member of the first generation of ‘Afro-Germans’: Born in Germany in 1925 to a Cameroonian father and a German mother, he grew up in Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic. As a child and teenager he worked in circuses and films and experienced the tightening knot of racial discrimination under the Nazis in the years before the Second World War. He survived the war as a forced labourer, founding a family and making a career as a journalist and actor in post-war West Germany. Since the 1980s he has become an important spokesman for the black German consciousness movement, acting as a human link between the first black German community of the inter-war period, the pan-Africanism of the 1950s and 1960s, and new generations of Germans of African descent. His life story is a classic account of coming to consciousness of a man who understands himself as both black and German; accordingly, it illuminates key aspects of modern German social history as well as of the post-war history of the African diaspora.

This book explores the general development of transnational radicalism between the 1850s and 1940s. This is achieved by means of a new and original study of the connected transnational lives and wider radical worlds of two important socialists, British-born Tom Mann (1856-1941) and Australian-born Robert Samuel Ross (1873-1941). Mann and Ross were very active, as labour organisers, editors and educators, in socialist and labour movements in the Anglophone world and beyond. They met in Australia in 1903, worked individually and together in trans-Tasman radical circles in Australia and New Zealand, and developed strong connections with radicals in the wider world. They kept in close touch after Mann’s departure for Britain, via South Africa, in 1910. They helped to build radical transnational movements and networks that sought to create a socialist alternative to capitalism and capitalist globalisation. These have been largely neglected in the literature. Based upon extensive primary- and secondary-based research, this book seeks to recapture this partly hidden world of transnational radicalism. In so doing it also makes a case in favour of transnational history against the ‘methodological nationalism’ which has dominated the subject of history for so long. It attempts to make a new and useful contribution to the literature on transnationalism, globalisation and social movements. It will appeal not only to historians but social scientists in general and all those interested in radical politics, especially those seeking radical alternatives to today’s neo-liberal globalisation and capitalism.

This book provides the materials needed for detailed study of Plato’s Atlantis story. It contains the two relevant Greek texts, the start of the Timaeus and incomplete Critias, in the Oxford Classical Text edition, with a new English translation of these texts. It also provides a full interpretative introduction, a medium-length commentary, and a Greek vocabulary. It is the only book which currently provides all these resources. Different kinds of readers will be able to use the book in different ways. Those primarily interested in Plato’s philosophy can focus on the translation and the introduction. Students or scholars of Greek can also use the text, commentary, and vocabulary.Distinctive features of the book include the full interpretative introduction, which takes account of recent scholarship on Plato’s story. Also, the commentary, interleaved with the Greek text for ease of reference, offers concise but informative help with the grammar and translation, supplemented by the complete Greek vocabulary. This makes the book useful in providing a medium-length prose text of considerable interest for students learning Greek and also for scholars wanting exegetical guidance. The book is based on an earlier edition, published in 1980 by Bristol Classical Press; however, the translation and most of the introduction are entirely new, and the commentary has been modified to match the new introduction and to take account of scholarship in the intervening years.