The nationalist element of Brexit populism had an entrenched ethnocentric character that was capable of breaking out in the in the form of racism. By 2016 overt racism had become taboo in public, but Brexitspeak had the linguistic means to dog whistle it. The new racism also enlarged the sense of ‘racism’ to cover refugee migrants entering the UK who were not dark-skinned. The sources of racism in the UK are diverse and subject to debate. In this chapter the focus is on the likely impact of racist demagoguery in generating and sustaining long-term racist attitudes. The example of Enoch Powell and his ‘rivers of blood’ speech is scrutinised in detail. But Powellism persisted well beyond the 1960s and 1970s: twenty years on it motivated the murder of Stephen Lawrence. In the age of the internet, Powell was a legitimising icon among neo-Nazi networks and appeared in website videos quoting and visualising his notorious speech. But veneration of Powell also remained apparent among right-wing Conservative politicians, activists and writers, and in their networking with ultra-right individuals.

The epilogue brings the narrative from the early years of the new century to recent events, just before sending the manuscript to print, in mid 2024. It tells of the changing attitudes in Germany both towards Jews living in that country and towards Israel and its policies of occupation in the Palestinian West Bank. The unique German–Israeli relationship during the last two decades is sketched against the background of the past, and finally, it is attempted to draw a balance between the apparent achievement of a decent Jewish life in Germany, on the one hand, and the new dangers of a rising politically organized right, simultaneously with a growing critique of Israel and the apparent emergence of a new antisemitism, on the other hand.

This chapter addresses the nexus between racism and return migration in the early 1980s, which marked the peak of anti-Turkish racism. As the call “Turks out!” (Türken raus!) grew louder, policymakers debated passing a law that would, in critics’ view, “kick out” the Turks and violate their human rights. During this “racial reckoning,” West Germans, Turkish migrants, and observers in Turkey grappled with the nature of racism itself. Although West Germans silenced the language of “race” (Rasse) and “racism” (Rassismus) after Hitler, there was an explosion of public discourse about those terms. Ordinary Germans, moreover, wrote to their president expressing their concerns about migration, revealing both biological and cultural racism. The simultaneous rise in Holocaust memory culture (Erinnerungskultur) is crucial for understanding this racial reckoning. While many Germans warned against the mistreatment of Turks as an unseemly continuity to Nazism, the emphasis on the singularity of the Holocaust offered Germans a way to dismiss anti-Turkish sentiment. Turkish migrants fought against this structural and everyday racism with various methods of activism. Turks at home, including the government and media following the 1980 military coup, viewed these debates with self-interest, lambasting German racism in the context of the 1983 remigration law.

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 discusses the entanglement of Brexit with the subsequent pandemic and the war in Ukraine, both of which have been used to muddy Brexit’s economic impact. It first analyses the rhetoric of the Leave campaign and of those politicians advocating for and negotiating Brexit. Those negotiations are bound to continue while politicians are reluctant to acknowledge Brexit as unfinished business. It then contextualizes contemporary fears of unlimited immigration as an echo of postimperial anxieties about British identity. These also feature in literary responses to Brexit which make them condition-of-England novels rather than investigations of wider Anglo-European relations. Forging a dialogue between the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fallout from the fourteenth-century bubonic plague suggests that political leadership and economic steer are crucial in determining a country’s recovery. How the pandemic was handled in the UK, paired with the economic impact of Brexit, aggravated the global supply issues caused by the war in Ukraine. This was not an inevitable outcome.

This chapter considers how English dictionaries made sense of sexuality beyond modern English society. It begins with the early modern assumption that a nation’s character was commensurate with its language, and that the moderate nature of England’s language and culture entailed that any ‘excess’ found in either must be the result of foreign influence. The chapter examines how sodomy and buggery, along with the semantic field of pederasty, were positioned by etymological, general, and hard-word dictionaries as ethically and ethnically remote, vices practised in the Mediterranean by ancient heathens or modern heretics. These xenophobic associations remained in dictionaries into the nineteenth century. Conversely, lexicographers’ retellings of classical myths of same-sex love—male and female—reveal sites of tension between the moderns’ veneration of Greek and Roman literature and their rejection of its pagan sensuality. The life of Sappho in particular provoked sharp disagreements over what her moral character had been, and what could or should be said about it, in a range of dictionary genres: hard-word, general, classical, and biographical.

The aim of this chapter will be threefold: to revisit the economic arguments advanced by Hilton and others by considering them in their full political context; to provide an account of the identity of the attackers and of the Flemings who were killed in East Anglia and London by drawing on documentary and prosopographical work; and to evaluate the effects of the massacre on the immigrant community and immigration in England after 1381. First, it will reconstruct a three-decade-long quarrel between native and alien weavers of London which culminated in the murder of Flemings during the Peasants’ Revolt.Then, attention will be turned to the available judicial records in order to develop the biographies and prosopography both of the attackers and the victims in East Anglia. Finally, the years after the revolt will be examined from the perspective of old and new immigrants, both of which groups seem to have been affected.

In the spring of 1593, a spate of viciously xenophobic libels appeared throughout London. The most notorious of these, the so-called Dutch Church libel, landed Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe in some trouble, possibly due to its prominent allusions to Marlowe’s plays. This chapter argues that the collaborative, censored playscript Sir Thomas More reprises the incendiary confluence of libel, xenophobia, and drama that took place in 1593. The play’s opening scenes dramatize the anti-immigrant Evil May Day riot of 1517 with an eye to the 1590s, showing the strangers’ crimes and the violent resistance of London’s citizens. The citizens take their grievances public once all legal avenues for redress have failed. Yet libel and riot are not the only extralegal recourses in the play. The latter two-thirds of Sir Thomas More track the rise and fall of its titular character, who himself repeatedly confronts the limits of the law. Thomas More’s career extends the initial dramatization of libel into an extended meditation on the remedies available to any subject afflicted by unjust law, from bills and libels to riot to the vexed administration of equity and the vagaries of conscience.

This chapter examines the politics of American immigrant fiction in the twentieth century, a time period that saw three large waves of immigration. The first took place between 1880 and 1924 and consisted primarily of European immigrants and Asian immigrants. The second wave ranged from 1924 to 1965 and was much smaller than the first, largely due to shifting political views toward immigrants which resulted in legislation that significantly restricted the flow of newcomers. The third wave was triggered in 1965 by another change in both national attitude and policy and it lasted into the early decades of the twentieth century. During this time, the immigrant novel reflected political realities through its portrayal of how migration to the United States brought success for some and marginalization for others. The genre confronted the myth that all newcomers enjoy equal potential to achieve the “American Dream” by exposing how racialization, the process of assigning individuals to categories based on characteristics such as skin color or facial features, significantly determined inclusion or exclusion.

Chapter 3 considers the making into ‘migrants’ of those who moved and asks what it meant for their kinship relations. It looks at processes of migrant-making through encounters at three different scales: nationally (with the British state), locally (with their neighbours, strangers, and other Christians), and transnationally (with their kin), arguing that migration compressed these two historical generations into one ‘migrant’ generation. At the same time, I show how migrants participated in these processes, particularly vis-à-vis their kin and, in doing so, fuelled the latter’s expectations of economic and other support. Central to the discussion are the ways in which the imaginings of migrant and non-migrant kin diverged post-migration, creating friction transnationally. Christianity also features prominently in this chapter, as migrants sought to make sense of their dashed expectations, while seeking means to pursue their aspirations and cultivate a sense of belonging.

Chapter 6 returns to questions of identity and citizenship, specifically what ‘South African’ means by contrast with ‘African’. The terms of this conversation have been pre- and over-determined by violent xenophobia, with major outbreaks having taken place across the country in 2008, 2015 and 2019. This chapter pauses on our understanding of the causes of xenophobic violence, especially South African exceptionalism, before considering in more detail the country’s literary responses to the phenomenon. On the one hand, writers like Phaswane Mpe, Patricia Schonstein and Andrew Brown develop strategies for interrogating xenophobic myths and for cultivating sympathy for migrants. However, some of these techniques hinge on questionable assumptions which threaten their humanising goals. Other South African works, like the film District 9 and an early work by Richard Kunzmann, develop explicit xenophobic tropes which can be understood in relation to the domestication of threat and the negotiation of change in South Africa after apartheid.

Chapter 3 analyzes how economic decay and aspirational neoliberalism justify anti-Bangladeshi xenophobia in Assam. This xenophobia relies on the view that East Bengalis have historically – at least since colonial times – been a source of "economic threat," real or imagined. The segregation of Bengali Muslims in Lower Assam sustains the perception of their outsider, even illegal, status, maintaining this view of the economic threat. While Assam’s desire for national self-determination characterized its relationship with mainland India in the initial decades since (Indian) independence, in recent years fractious politics and separatist movements found resolution in anti-Bangladeshi sentiments, as it served as the common cause that would unite the various ideologically opposed sections of society. The most recent example of this is the mobilization surrounding khilonjiya or indigenous interests in the context of population registration (NRC) and the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (2019). They underscore how anti-establishment claims fit alongside nationalist ideas of strict border control and the expulsion of those deemed foreign, i.e., Bangladeshi. In effect, anti-Bangladeshi sentiments become the glue that holds together the Indian nation state.

The chapter discusses corpus–linguistic challenges and possibilities involved in exploring Hate Speech linked to different constructions in Danish and German. Compiled especially for the XPEROHS–project, grammatically and semantically annotated corpora of Danish and German Twitter and Facebook posts enable qualitative and quantitative exploration of individual word forms or lexemes as well as constructions, understood as conventionalized, non–compositional form-meaning pairings. The chapter illustrates and explains various corpus–linguistic strategies applied to the XPEROHS–corpora and presents their results. Furthermore, we discuss prominent grammatical constructions used to denigrate certain groups like foreigners or Muslims in German and Danish. These include, for example, the I am no racist but… construction, which only superficially signals a balanced standpoint using a highly formulaic introductory phrase. Another construction that works similarly in German and Danish is the alleged (+ ADJ) + NOUN–construction (as in the alleged refugees) in which the adjective supposedly reverses the meaning of the noun. However, though closely related, the two languages do not share all constructions. This is exemplified by the German oh–so + ADJ + NOUN–construction (as in the oh-so-peaceful Muslims), that negates a positive characteristic indicated by the adjective in an ironic way.

There is not a single populism but diverse populisms which respond to different local concerns. However, most populisms are configured around at least two of the following societal concerns: (1) a sense of economic insecurity and status anxiety; (2) xenophobic attitudes toward ‘Others’, in particular migrants and refugees; (3) disenchantment with incumbent political elites, combined with the perception that the establishment is arrogant, remote and insensitive to the needs of “real people”; (4) resentment against globalization, internationalism, and renewed support for nationalism (economic and other); (5) cultural and religious resentment, expressed in anti-modernist, anti-Enlightenment and anti-secularist views; and (6) impatience with liberal constraints upon government, and frustration with checks and balances that are viewed as institutional obstacles to “getting things done”. It is emphasized that in exploring the causes of successful populism one must focus not only on the "demand side" but also on the "supply side" of political populism.

The German emigrant nation proved strikingly resilient despite the Allies’ global efforts to undermine it. The leadership in many of those states confused the presence of Germans all over the world with a German presence somehow beholden to and shaped by the German nation-state.That was their great miscalculation.The demise of Imperial Germany did not dramatically undermine these communities or undercut their soft forms of power because neither had been Imperial Germany’s creations.As a result, Germans quickly returned to being the United States’ greatest rivals in Latin America and their businesses and communities again were flourishing by the middle of the 1920s.At the same time, however, the creation of German minorities across central and eastern Europe mattered a great deal; contributing to the rise of virulent ethno-nationalism, particularly among a younger generation.Within those new contexts, the global flows of people were now channeled and shaped by ever-more stringent immigration laws in the United States and elsewhere as well as ever-more political refugees from the USSR and the nationalizing Central and Eastern European states.

"I have learned these words when I first went to school in La Habana, Cuba." This is how Ofelia Garcia introduces the reader to an in-depth discussion of the concepts of translanguaging, multilingualism, plurilingualism, heteroglossia, xenophobia, and discrimination. She explains how well-intentioned educational programs can carry the stigma of Otherness and discrimination. She strongly advocates the use of the full semiotic repertoires of students, moving away from monolingual ideologies and neo-liberal economics, curricula and pedagogy.