This chapter contributes to the debates about Samuel Johnson’s politics by considering the inadequacy of “Tory” as a label as balanced by Johnson’s unique contribution to the British public sphere in light of his determination to oppose aggressive forms of cultural nationalism. Considering Johnson’s journalism, his critical biographies, and Rasselas, Hawes explores Johnson’s deliberate cultivation of an anti-colonial perspective that burst through the usual framework for public discussions of the Seven Years War. In opposing the “Whig interpretation of history,” Johnson set himself against the principal vector of expansionist ideology. In his ability to combine anti-slavery and anti-colonial positions, Hawes argues, Johnson is uniquely prescient – and sometimes politically quite radical. His politics need to be understood as specifically anti-colonial, often reframing discussions of supposedly national affairs as manifestations of a colonial agenda.

This essay focuses on Sarah Winnemucca’s development of a school for the Paiutes that would avoid the assimilationist violence often associated with white-run schools for Native Americans in the nineteenth century. Following her book Life Among the Piutes into this history gives us a way of thinking about Native American literature more broadly, and the histories that led to its emergence, its necessity, in a nation determined to control the voices and destinies of Native Americans across the country. To become educated at Winnemucca’s school is not to “become white.” A combination of Northern Paiute traditions and Elizabeth Peabody’s feminist-minded educational philosophy, the Peabody Institute was a powerful counterpoint to the U.S. boarding schools of the time. Winnemucca’s interpretation of her school is apparent in several features: the centrality of the mother figure; the emphasis on Native American languages, traditions, and cultures; and the role of the Native American woman – the interpreter – as educator. In these terms, the Native American woman determines the direction of her school, a truly anti-colonial move. As Life Among the Piutes and the nineteenth-century newspaper articles and letters teach us, then, there was an alternative to the colonialist boarding school.

Although a substantial number of plays written by black and Asian writers were staged during the first half of the twentieth century, there has been little systematic analysis of how such work has contributed to the growing infrastructure of what was to later become a thriving culture of black and Asian theatre in Britain. This chapter explores the cultural networks of the period that produced theatre in order to present alternative views to those of empire, and the common thread of which was the struggle for civil and national rights and independence. Charting the background to productions put on by pioneering organisations such as the Indian Art and Dramatic Society (1912), this chapter examines the varied and complex context from which these early performances emerged and their impact at the time. Within this framework, the chapter evaluates the contributions of individual writers, whether the better-known, such as Una Marson and C. L. R. James from the Caribbean, or the lesser-known, such as Dusé Mohamed Ali and Henry Francis Downing, members of the Pan-African movement, Niranjan Pal from India, and the Irish-Indian novelist and playwright Aubrey Menen.

Histories of the growth of a united Europe are commonly told from a Western perspective: 1989 marked a natural ‘return to Europe’ for a continental periphery ‘captured’ by Soviet Communism – a key moment on the road to the absorption of the East into the European project. We argue that such histories ignore Eastern Europeans’ role and the contested nature of what constituted Europe. Postwar decolonisation had thrown up visions of a less bordered Europe or Eurafrican-style economic projects in both East and West. Eastern European actors from the early 1970s played important roles in contributing to building a different Europe based on East-West reconciliation, cultural unity, and powerful forms of bordering to the South (‘Fortress Europe’). Regional elites were pivotal in the establishment of the Helsinki Process which enabled such economic and cultural integration, and in promoting European imaginaries which reified historical Christian whiteness and excluded Africa and Islam. Central-Eastern European intellectuals effectively promoted a strictly bordered vision of the region to the West as they sought to integrate themselves into its structures in the 1990s. This vision remained powerful in those Eastern states which joined the European Union; an independent Russia, however, turned quickly to Eurasianism.