This chapter explains different definitions of citizenship including citizenship as status, as rights, as participation, and as identity. It highlights key immigration laws and periods of immigrant inclusion and exclusion. The chapter also presents basic data on demographic change through American political history.

This chapter makes the case that Willa Cather and Abraham Cahan present immigrant characters in their fiction as potentially powerful figures by virtue of their bi- and multilingualism. These, and other writers such as John Dos Passos, Mike Gold, and Anzia Yezierska, show that those who master English as well as the languages into which they are born are socially, geographically, artistically, and intellectually mobile figures. Such characters, in their codeswitching, exemplify a kind of linguistic mobility that is at the heart of ethnic American modernist literature, and that demonstrates pluralistic values that were often socially and politically absent in the period of their creation. These modernist writers look to language and the interpolation of foreign languages, whether through translational mimesis, codeswitching, or selective reproduction, as empowering. In doing so, they demonstrate the rich potential of an ethnic American literary modernism. The immigrant’s voice, with all its inflections and idiosyncrasies, is presented as the accent of the future.

This chapter offers a pluralist reading of transitional justice built around three meanings of pluralism. The first is value pluralism – the idea, dear to Isaiah Berlin, that values are irreducibly manifold, potential conflicting and frequently incommensurable in such a way that they cannot be ranked or weighed on any single scale. The second meaning of pluralism is cultural pluralism. It refers to the fact that there are many different cultures, many different collective ways of life, none of which can claim superiority. While insisting on the possibility of a cross-cultural conversation around core values, the proposed pluralist approach rejects the normal model’s tendency to reduce transitional justice to one set of (Western) cultural forms. The third form of pluralism briefly considered is legal pluralism, meaning the coexistence of competing legal orders. Discussing Rwanda’s experience with the so-called gacaca courts, the chapter suggests a pluralist understanding of the rule of law flexible enough to accommodate cultural variation while remaining committed to what I take to be its universal core. The chapter ends by proposing a pluralist method for thinking about transitional justice, which is linked to basic commitments referred to as sense of reality, anti-monism, situated thinking, decolonised cosmopolitanism and fallibilistic mentality. The chapter argues that these commitments can help mitigate a number of problematic trends in contemporary transitional justice discourse and practice.

This chapter explores Ellison’s critical engagement with the black cultural radicalisms of the Black Power era (c. 1965-75). The chapter’s main focus is Ellison’s response to the writer-activist Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). For Ellison, the work of 1960s black radicals was an unwarranted, even unprincipled refusal of the promise of American cultural pluralism, a promise that blacks themselves had long struggled mightily to fulfill. But Baraka’s generation had reckoned seriously with pluralism; it was not simply Black Power’s other. Indeed, a number of Baraka’s contemporaries embraced Ellison’s pluralist interventions as a usable black past.

This chapter explains the concept of reasonable multiculturalism. Building on the Rawlsian notion of reasonableness, and on Kymlicka’s formulation of multiculturalism, the mechanisms for reconciliation between liberalism and multiculturalism are outlined. What are the boundaries of multiculturalism within the framework of liberal democracy? What are the boundaries of state interference in the business of minority cultures whose norms and practices are at odd with liberal democracy? Reasonability assumes acceptance of the underpinning shared principles. Cultures that do not adhere to these principles are perceived as less reasonable. The extent of reasonability varies. But lacking reasonability does not immediately entail that the liberal majority should intervene in the business of the subcultures. Interference is warranted to restore justice. The chapter discusses the concept of mutual respect, distinguishing between two forms of cultural pluralism – ‘multination’ and ‘polyethnic’ states – and between two kinds of rights that a group might claim: the first involves the right of a group against its own members, the second involves the right of a group against the larger society. Furthermore, the nature of liberal tolerance and the mechanisms of deliberative democracy are explained, the latter instrumental for resolving disputes in a liberal democracy in a civil, non-violent way.

In the final chapter, Sebastian Luft revisits Michael Friedman's famous claim that Cassirer's philosophical vision has the potential to overcome the split between analytic and continental philosophy. This chapter first formulates some criteria for a post-split philosophy, namely a balance between historical sensitivity and systematic focus, a priori and empirical truths, conceptual analysis and descriptive synthesis, and exegesis and jargon. Next, Luft shows why and how Cassirer's thought lives up to each of these criteria in his own writings as well as in characteristic discussions with some of his contemporaries, in particular Husserl and Heidegger. The conclusion of this chapter explains how Cassirer combines these criteria by installing the interdependence of transcendental idealism and cultural pluralism. Luft presents these as the two most important aspects of Cassirer's work, both in terms of actual cultural practice and the way in which philosophical and scientific scholars account for it.

This chapter examines the vision of key non-fictional essays written by creative writers such as C. L .R. James, Wilson Harris, George Lamming, Salman Rushdie, etc. and puts them in dialogue with the critical and theoretical debates of major literary and cultural critics such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Homi K. Bhabha, Avtar Brah, and others. Pointing to shared areas of concern, elements of synergy, and extracting elements which illuminate the historiography of creative and critical exchange, this chapter focuses on particular moments of cultural intervention. It traces how the history and development of this body of writing – which has now gained belated acknowledgement – as well as the literary, cultural, and theoretical debates that have surrounded it are inextricably linked with its political and historical context of emergence.

This chapter offers a critical overview of historical, cultural, and literary debates around ‘Windrush’. It revisits how the boat’s arrival in 1948 has come to represent the ‘beginnings’ of multicultural Britain and the consequent reshaping of the nation’s identity. It examines which factors influenced the writers and works that came to prominence and gained an enduring currency as Windrush narratives; it also attends to works that have been less celebrated. The particular focus of the chapter is on how the construction of the Windrush experience within literary works has aligned with wider political narratives to emphasise the ongoing challenges around the recognition and accommodation of black subjects within British culture and society. The chapter addresses two important blind spots within the literary framing of the Windrush experience: writings that emphasise transnational attachments and cultural mobility, as well as writings by women.