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Liverpool was one of the first consulates to be established by the USA. It was also the first port of call for most American travellers throughout the nineteenth century. Many of these visitors left accounts of their experiences in the city. Some are detailed, like Herman Melville’s description of the docks; others give briefer impressions. These selections demonstrate the rich variety of cultural contacts between Britain and the USA throughout the nineteenth century.

Scottish emigrants carried a rich associational culture with them to the new worlds in which they settled, often ‘clubbing together’ along lines of ethnicity shortly after first foot fall. Yet while a crucial element of community life post-migration, no one has yet problematized Scottish associations, such as St Andrew’s societies or Burns clubs, as a series of transnational connections that were deeply rooted in the civic life of their respective communities. This book provides the first global study to capture the wider relevance of the Scots’ associational culture, arguing that associations and formal sociability are a key to explaining how migrants negotiated their ethnicity in the diaspora and connected to social structures in diverse settlements. Moving beyond the traditional nineteenth-century settler dominions, the book offers a unique comparative focus, bringing together the near Scottish diaspora in England and Ireland with that in North America, Africa, and Australasia to assess the evolution of Scottish ethnic associations, as well as their diverse roles as sites of memory and expressions of civility. The book promotes understanding not only of Scottish ethnicity overseas, but also of how different types of ethnic associational activism made diaspora tangible.

What did the Edwardians know about Spain, and what was that knowledge worth? The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession draws on a vast store of largely unstudied primary source material to investigate Spain’s place in the turn-of-the-century British popular imagination. Set against a background of unprecedented emotional, economic and industrial investment in Spain, the book traces the extraordinary transformation that took place in British knowledge about the country and its diverse regions, languages and cultures between the tercentenary of the Spanish Armada in 1888 and the outbreak of World War I twenty-six years later. This empirically-grounded cultural and material history reveals how, for almost three decades, Anglo-Spanish connections, their history and culture were more visible, more colourfully represented, and more enthusiastically discussed in Britain’s newspapers, concert halls, council meetings and schoolrooms, than ever before. It shows how the expansion of education, travel, and publishing created unprecedented opportunities for ordinary British people not only to visit the country, but to see the work of Spanish and Spanish-inspired artists and performers in British galleries, theatres and exhibitions. It explores the work of novelists, travel writers, journalists, scholars, artists and performers to argue that the Edwardian knowledge of Spain was more extensive, more complex and more diverse than we have imagined.

Drawing on multi-disciplinary debates surrounding the cultural production of place, space and memory in the post-industrial city, this book explores the role of moving images in representations and perceptions of everyday urban landscapes. The arguments it puts forward are based on a case study of Liverpool in the north west of England and draw from a spatial database of over 1700 archive films of the city from 1897 to the present day. The study combines critical spatial analysis, archival research and qualitative methods to navigate a city's cinematic geographies as mapped across a broad spectrum of film genres, including amateur film, travelogues, newsreels, promotional films, documentaries and features. As the second most filmed city in the UK, and formerly second city of Empire, Liverpool boasts a rich industrial, architectural and maritime heritage that has positioned the city – which was European Capital of Culture in 2008 – at the forefront of current debates on regeneration, visuality and cultural memory. The tension between the city as spectacle and the city as archive, and the contradictions that underpin the growing ‘cinematization’ of postmodern urban space are at the core of the arguments developed throughout the book. Examining the contention that, as spatial practices, the production and consumption of urban cinematic geographies are tied to shifting cultures and geographies of mobility, the book maps the critical interplay between material and immaterial spaces of the city and re-evaluates the significance – and ‘place’ – of location in contemporary film practice and urban cultural theory.

Recent history, notably the diplomatic fracas surrounding the Iraq war in 2003 and continued cultural nationalism on the part of French elites faced with the English language and American mass culture, has tended to put forth notions of ‘France’ and ‘America’ as antithetical. This book seeks to break these paradigms, and to speak of entwined cultures and histories, promoting diasporic notions of Frenchness. The book is an attempt to intervene in these debates and paradigms in the French and American public spheres, and in university disciplines, particularly in French studies, but it also has relevance for American studies, comparative literature, film and cultural studies, history, Iberian and Latin-American Studies, and postcolonial studies. After a theoretical introduction, it explores the cultural history of seven different French Atlantic spaces, all the time attentive to the material determinants of their existence in the Atlantic world. Two are in metropolitan France, one is a French North Atlantic territory, one is in Quebec, one in the United States/northern Caribbean, one in the southern Caribbean/South America, and one in Latin America.

This book provides an exhaustive reading of the significant yet understudied intellectual review Lignes, from 1987 to 2017, to demonstrate how it has managed to preserve and develop the legacy of French radical thought often referred to as ‘French Theory’ or ‘la pensée 68’. Whilst many studies on intellectual reviews from the 1930s to the 1980s exist, this book crucially illuminates the shifting intellectual and political culture of France since the 1980s, filling a major gap in contemporary debates on the continued relevance of French intellectuals. This book provides a strong counter-narrative to the received account that, after the anti-totalitarian ‘liberal moment’ of the late 1970s, Marxism and structuralism were completely banished from the French intellectual sphere. It provides the historical context behind the rise of such internationally renowned thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière Jean-Luc Nancy, whilst placing them within an intellectual genealogy stretching back to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot in the 1930s. The book also introduces the reader to lesser known but nonetheless significant thinkers, including Lignes editor Michel Surya, Dionys Mascolo, Daniel Bensaïd, Fethi Benslama, Anselm Jappe and Robert Kurz. Through the review’s pages, a novel cultural history of France emerges as intellectuals respond to pressing contemporary issues, such as the fall of Communism, the European migrant crisis and rising nationalist tensions, the globalisation of financial capitalism and the 2008 economic crisis, scandals surrounding paedophilia and the return of religious thought to France, as well as debates on literature and the political value of art.

In 1804, Haiti declared its independence from France to become the world’s first ‘black’ nation state. Throughout the nineteenth century, Haiti maintained its independence, consolidating and expanding its national and, at times, imperial projects. In doing so, Haiti joined a host of other nation states and empires that were emerging and expanding across the Atlantic World. The largest and, in many ways, most powerful of these empires was that of Britain. Haiti in the British Imagination is the first book to focus on the diplomatic relations and cultural interactions between Haiti and Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. As well as a story of British imperial aggression and Haitian ‘resistance’, it is also one of a more complicated set of relations: of rivalry, cultural exchange and intellectual dialogue. At particular moments in the Victorian period, ideas about Haiti had wide-reaching relevancies for British anxieties over the quality of British imperial administration, over what should be the relations between ‘the British’ and people of African descent, and defining the limits of black sovereignty. Haitians were key in formulating, disseminating and correcting ideas about Haiti. Through acts of dialogue, Britons and Haitians impacted on the worldviews of one another, and with that changed the political and cultural landscapes of the Atlantic World.

As a former British colony (1842-1997) and now a Special Administrative Region (from 1997 onwards) practicing the “One Country Two Systems” policy with the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong has witnessed at all times how relations are formed, dissolved and refashioned amidst changing powers, identities and narratives. With an eye to real-life events and cultural representations, the book presents an interdisciplinary study of “local relations” through the lens of the things and places that stand or that have once stood for Hong Kong’s “local”. The book argues that the signification of the local and the constellation of local relations embody the continuous acts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization beyond the political arena and through the cultural and social relations formed between cultural icons and urban dwellers. In its post-handover, post-hangover years where Hong Kong’s local multiples by appearance and connotation as in the 2014 Umbrella Movement and the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Protests, the book proposes lessons to learn from the city in face of the discourses of nationalism, globalization and localism. As more are to unfold, the book opens up manifold postcolonial perspectives by the agency of both human and nonhuman to confront and interrogate the contemporary experiences—unprecedented since the Cold War era—shared by Hong Kong and the world where established beliefs and systems are continuously challenged in the postmillennial era. After all, what does it mean, or take, to live in post-1997 Hong Kong when the local, global and national are constantly given new meanings?

Enriching the metropole-colony frame that has tended to dominate studies of European colonial empire, this book assumes a transnational approach to modern Italy and establishes how Italy’s national project and history of nationalism was intimately bound up with the fantasy—and then reality during the fascist period—of an empire in the Mediterranean. Although largely forgotten in both Italy and Greece, Italian imperial rule in the Dodecanese islands tells the story of the making of modern Europe at its margins. Unlike other studies of Italian colonialism, that emphasize Mussolini’s creation of a new ‘Roman’ empire, Italy’s Sea demonstrates that ambitions for colonization in the Mediterranean extend back to the Liberal unification of Italy. By retracing how ideas of the local, the regional and the global were united with the idea of the ‘national’ in Italy, the book offers of new perspective of postcolonial critique of both Italy and Europe, and sheds light on contemporary ideas of race, nation and belonging today.

The Football Association of England has become a multi-billion pound industry. But how did English football become not only the defining sport of the nation but also one of the most successful sports in the world? This book tells the story of the early days of professional football in England, revealing the distant origins of today's game. Making use of archival materials from football clubs, unions and associations, the book presents a compelling picture of football teams and players in the early days of the twentieth century, tracing the development of the system of professional teams from the hundreds of town, club and school teams that dotted the countryside. The top tier of those teams comprised the Football League that, by the 1920s, was synonymous with the very idea of professional football in the minds of fans and sportswriters alike. The book illuminates the role played by the Football League and by successful clubs such as Arsenal and Aston Villa as the rules, standards and structure of the modern game were being codified. The book also considers the careers and influences of early players, including such well-known names as Billy Meredith, Dixie Dean and Alex James. As the popularity of the game grew and sports media proliferated, players found themselves becoming national stars, their portraits on cigarette cards bought by fans throughout England.

This book explores the history and the vicissitudes of one of Paris’s most extraordinary areas, the Marais. Centrally located on the Right Bank, this neighbourhood was from the Middle Ages through to the eighteenth century the most fashionable in the city, headquarters of the nobility who endowed it with resplendent architecture. The Court’s move to Versailles and the Revolution of 1789 led to the quartier’s decline, so that in the nineteenth century and the earlier part of the twentieth it was in parlous shape, its fine buildings run down and often severely overcrowded. It escaped wholesale destruction in the post-War frenzy of modernization largely thanks to André Malraux, who as Culture Minister fostered the restoration of the area. Malraux’s efforts were, however, not immune from criticism, sometimes seen as a form of socio-economic cleansing with concomitant fossilization, and thus emblematic of the problems faced by a city which has always been torn between the preservation of its past and the need to adapt to social and historical change. The book focuses particularly on literary, cinematic and other artistic reproductions of the quartier, of which it attempts to provide a comprehensive overview, and foregrounds particularly its importance as home to and base of two highly significant minorities – the Jewish and the gay communities.

Pen, print and communication in the eighteenth century is a volume of fourteen essays each of which explores the production, distribution and consumption of both private and public texts during the Enlightenment from a variety of historical, theoretical and critical perspectives.  During the eighteenth century there was a growing interest in recording, listing and documenting the world, whether for personal interest and private consumption, or general record and the greater good. Such documentation was done through both the written and printed word. Each genre had its own material conventions and spawned industries which supported these practices. This volume considers writing and printing in parallel: it highlights the intersections between the two methods of communication; discusses the medium and materiality of the message; considers how writing and printing were deployed in the construction of personal and cultural identities; and explores the different dimensions surrounding the production, distribution and consumption of private and public letters, words and texts during the eighteenth-century. In combination the chapters in this volume consider how the processes of both writing and printing contributed to the creation of cultural identity and taste, assisted in the spread of knowledge and furthered bother personal, political, economic, social and cultural change in Britain and the wider-world. This volume provides and original narrative on the nature of communication and brings a fresh perspective on printing history, print culture and the literate society of the Enlightenment.

Despite its famous image as a divided city – of wealthy high-rises and the surrounding, poverty-stricken favelas – Rio de Janeiro’s culture has been shaped by porous boundaries and multi-ethnic encounters. This book offers a groundbreaking perspective on Rio de Janeiro that focuses on the Cidade Nova (New City), one of the most compelling spaces in the history of modern cities. Once known as both a ‘Little Africa’ and as a ‘Jewish Neighborhood,’ the New City was an important reference for prominent writers, artists, pioneering social scientists and foreign visitors. It played a crucial role in foundational narratives of Brazil as ‘the country of carnival’ and as a ‘racial democracy.’ Going back to the neighborhood’s creation by royal decree in 1811, this study sheds light on how initially marginalized practices –like samba music– became emblematic of national identity. A critical crossroads of Rio, the New City was largely razed for the construction of a monumental avenue during World War II. Popular musicians protested, but ‘progress’ in the automobile age had a price. Drawing on a broad range of historical, theoretical and literary sources, Porous City rethinks Rio de Janeiro’s role in the making of Brazil, as well as its significance to key global debates about modernity, urban planning and cultural practices.

Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France offers a critical assessment of the ways in which French writers, filmmakers, musicians and other artists descended from immigrants from former colonial territories bring their specificity to bear on the bounds and applicability of French republicanism, “Frenchness” and national identity, and contemporary cultural production in France.

Revisioning French Culture brings together a striking group of leading intellectuals and scholars to explore new avenues of research in French and Francophone Studies. Covering the medieval period through the twenty-first century, this volume presents investigations into a vast array of subjects. Revisioning French Culture grapples with topics vital to the contemporary cultural landscape, including universalism, globalization, the idea of Francophonie, and religious and secular identity. This essay collection furthermore transcends and illuminates the contemporary by exploring matters that have long resonated in the humanities and letters, such as death, war, trauma, power and politics, notions of the truth, conceptions of the self, and modes of reading and writing. With contributions by a number of figures known across the humanities and the social sciences, Revisioning French Culture explores the foundations of the French and Francophone world, providing cultural, political, and historical context for the crisis facing democracy and liberalism around the world today.

Over the past 25 years, Rwanda has undergone remarkable shifts and transitions: culturally, economically, and educationally the country has gone from strength to strength. While much scholarship has understandably been retrospective, seeking to understand, document and commemorate the Genocide against the Tutsi, this volume gathers diverse perspectives on the changing social and cultural fabric of Rwanda since 1994. Rwandan Since 1994 considers the context of these changes, particularly in relation to the ongoing importance of remembering and in wider developments in the Great Lakes and East Africa regions. Equally it explores what stories of change are emerging from Rwanda: creative writing and testimonies, as well as national, regional, and international political narratives. The contributors interrogate which frameworks and narratives might be most useful for understanding different kinds of change, what new directions are emerging, and how Rwanda's trajectory is ongoingly shaped by other global factors. The international set of contributors includes creative writers, practitioners, activists, and scholars from African studies, history, anthropology, education, international relations, modern languages, law and politics. As well as delving into the shifting dynamics of religion and gender in Rwanda today, the book brings to light the experiences of lesser-discussed groups of people such as the Twa and the children of perpetrators.

This book explores the close affinities that bound together anti-slavery activists in Britain and the USA during the mid-nineteenth century, years that witnessed the overthrow of slavery in both the British Caribbean and the American South. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, the book sheds important new light on the dynamics of abolitionist opinion building during the Age of Reform, from books and artefacts to anti-slavery songs, lectures and placards. Building an anti-slavery public required patience and perseverance. It also involved an engagement with politics, even if anti-slavery activists disagreed about what form that engagement should take. This is a book about the importance of transatlantic co-operation and the transmission of ideas and practices. Yet, at the same time, it is also alert to the tensions that underlay these Atlantic affinities, particularly when it came to what was sometimes perceived as the increasing Americanization of anti-slavery protest culture. Above all, the book stresses the importance of personality, perhaps best exemplified in the enduring transatlantic friendship between George Thompson and William Lloyd Garrison.