New York City had a significant role in Richard Wright’s search for political and artistic freedom. During the ten years he spent there, the emerging writer reached the pinnacle of his career amid the city’s magazines, newspapers, publishers, and cultural brokers. Wright utilized various professionalizing networks, including the CPUSA and WPA, and he published Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son shortly after his arrival in 1937. Additionally, he radicalized the short-lived New Challenge, exposed Harlem’s poverty in the Daily Worker, and fictionalized his research on black domestic workers and juvenile delinquency in “Black Hope” and Rite of Passage, respectively. Wright’s years in New York were his career’s most productive, and this success was reflected in his personal life, which included settling into marriage and fatherhood as well as the 7 Middagh artistic community. Although New York fostered these interracial domestic relationships, its boroughs were not free from the Jim Crowism African Americans lived under elsewhere. The prejudices Wright encountered in Brooklyn and Manhattan, on top of those he had experienced in the South, influenced his decision to leave the U.S., as he believed the move to Paris would free him to write with new perspective on American race relations.

The American railroad circus during the Gilded Age (1865–1900) and the Progressive Era (1900–1920) experienced a vibrant and hugely successful golden age. During that time of tremendous national growth, the circus industry reached its highest number of touring companies, boasted the largest number and variety of acts, and made the industry’s most significant number of advancements in technology and management. It connected urban and rural areas, rich and poor, and national and international audiences of all colours and races. However, this was the height of the Jim Crow era in which racial minorities, especially African Americans, experienced legal forms of discrimination and brutal violence. All aspects of American life were affected by strict racial limitations as citizenship was irrevocably linked to whiteness. This chapter argues that the American railroad circus of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era embodied the budding imperialistic spirit of the nation and reflected, supported, and challenged the race norms of the age. It reveals how African Americans, a large American minority racial group, used the circus to advance their own careers and goals in an everchanging cultural landscape. These challenges often took the forms of economic and cultural independence.

Britain in 1972 was different in many ways to the Britain of 1956. The post-war years of full employment were gone; poverty had been ‘rediscovered’; unemployment was rising; the 1960s had simultaneously seen the emergence of ‘affluence’ and countercultural challenges to it; racism and anti-immigration sentiments were a visible and endemic part of daily life and were slipping into the political mainstream; and Britain had lost most of its empire. And yet the anti-racist politics and radicalism of the 1960s and Britain’s increasingly established Black and Asian populations were showing that there were new ways of being British. This chapter explores how these shifts affected the reception and resettlement of the Ugandan Asians. It shows that the expellees – sometimes treated as ‘refugees’, sometimes as ‘immigrants’ – while welcomed by the government-led Ugandan Resettlement Board and a diverse and energetic voluntary initiative, often faced a Britain experienced by its poorest inhabitants. A place of slum housing, rack-renting landlords, a byzantine welfare system and low pay, intensified for the expellees by institutionalised and casual racism. At the same time grassroots activists, race relations workers and the sustained efforts of the expellees themselves to establish new lives in Britain demonstrated that Britain was also being re-worked from within.

Chapter 5 recounts how social scientists, during and after the war, tended to treat discrimination as a system-one with interlocking legal, political, and economic dimensions. By the 1950s systemic frameworks had receded in favor of more individualistic explanations for the “race problem.” The study of discrimination remained strikingly cross-disciplinary, but the lens of prejudice-individual attitudes in the aggregate-was newly prominent, supported by philanthropy and Cold War discretion. Gary Becker brought microeconomics to discrimination in this period, too, in an approach that, like the psychology of prejudice, stressed the causal priority of dispositions. The announcement of formal equality in the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s complicated the study of race for the balance of the century. Systemic accounts were partially revived, and evidence for persisting racial inequality was widely documented. But causal factors proved harder to identify. In the wake of de jure segregation, even radical critics of “institutional racism” and “internal colonialism” conceded that discrimination's effects were easier to describe than its causal dynamics. Quantitative sociologists and economists deployed a cascade of measures that demonstrated disparate outcomes, though again without clear explanatory accounts rooted in discrimination.

This chapter explores two complementary dimensions of acquisition and display of power by local elites in Santo Domingo. The first is political and institutional. In the early sevententh century, the sale of offices became standard practice in the Spanish empire allowing local elites to buy seats of regidores in local Cabildos across the empire in perpetuity, thus gaining control of their own local governments. A seat on the Cabildo of Santo Domingo became a prized possession for elites to reaffirm their position in the island social hierarchy. It also enabled access to important economic opportunities, which triggered rivalries among its members. The second one is also political, but it is more narrowly focused on racial politics, on the role of these elite men as slaveholders and the way they used their enslaved workers in their personal and political rivalries. The elites of Santo Domingo proudly manifested their power and tried to impose it upon their peers through their use of their enslaved workers, whose obedience (particularly when deployed in opposition to others) gave true meaning to the institutional and class power these elite men had acquired.

This chapter explores the emergence of black and Asian British writing as it began to become institutionalised: in school curricula, universities and higher education, as well as on the lists of educational and mainstream publishing houses. Examining the material conditions impacting on the recognition of this writing across Britain’s arts and educational cultures, it focuses on the second half of the twentieth century, especially the turbulent political period from the late 1970s onwards, to the present day. Though evidence of this history remains uneven, it is important to view the institutionalisation alongside specific political, cultural, and material contexts, in particular the policies of anti-racism, multiculturalism, and cultural diversity as well as government-driven enquiries like the crucial investigation into structural racial inequalities following the Stephen Lawrence murder in the 1999 Macpherson Report. Examining the political and educational initiatives behind arts funding, the chapter highlights how the growing interest in postcolonial studies since the 1990s has also created a wider market for black and Asian British writing, both for publishers and on university courses.