This chapter studies the creation of Algeria as a topos of transregional literature during the War of Independence (1954–1962) on the pages of the Beirut-based literary and political journal al-Ādāb. This process relied on gendered imagery of suffering Algerian bodies, notably the FLN fighter Djamila Bouhired, who became an Arab nationalist icon following her imprisonment by the French. Arabic transregionalism imagined Algeria as a palpable expression of Arab nationalist rhetoric on Arab revolution. This led al-Ādāb authors to critique Jean-Paul Sartre, insisting on the Arab, rather than global, scale of Algeria’s decolonization. In al-Ādāb poetry, I show that contributors took for granted that fuṣḥā, as anti-colonial transregional print medium, would be the vehicle of postcolonial Algerian literature. Al-Ādāb thus elided complex realities of multilingualism in Algeria, taking for granted, and even viewing as inevitable, the “restoration” of fuṣḥā as a sign of Algeria’s proto-Arab identity. The chapter reads al-Ādāb’s editorial production of itself as transregional journal, including the insertion of advertisements, debates, and exchanges to map circulation networks. I detail the journal’s efforts to recruit Algerian contributors to educate transregional publics on the country’s history and culture and demonstrate its support for the new FLN state after independence.

This chapter reads writings on and in Arabic in the Moroccan avant-garde journals Souffle and Anfās (1966–1971) between national and transregional scales for literature. After 1969, this movement produced itself as a periphery within transregional literature by plugging into literary networks with the Mashreq, particularly Beirut. Contributors experimented with various forms of fuṣḥā – from iconoclastic, futurist poetics to dogmatic Marxist-Leninist prose – to found the written Arabic to express Moroccan literature’s belonging in an unfolding Arab revolution and to shatter the Moroccan monarchy’s monopoly over the language as the sign of permanent, sacred, Arab-Islamic national culture. For Souffles–Anfās, Morocco’s connection to transregionalism lay in the people’s emotional connection to the Arabic language and their Arab nationalist sentiments. This avant-garde movement sought – but never found – a Moroccan poetry to launch into the transregional system. The chapter reads issues of Anfās as transregional literature, Arabic poetics in bilingual Souffles, and translational engagements in French with a future Moroccan Arabic.

Dr. Bailey sets the tone for this text as a filing the gap in social work education and education across the helping professions in that it creates text that demonstrates sound and innovative application of decolonial lenses, anti-oppressive lenses, and empowerment practice in clinical supervision and social work leadership. Dr. Bailey urges the reader to understand that the process of decolonization within the helping professions is a process across systems, environments, and over time toward liberation.

This contribution retells the familiar story of the international tax regime from an unconventional perspective, revealing how racial fears have burdened communities around the globe. It explores the impact of anti-Black racism on the international tax regime, tracing the evolution of international tax rules that have impoverished vulnerable states and eviscerated social safety nets in wealthier ones. Decolonisation granted political power and economic autonomy to erstwhile possessions only to watch it be stripped away by treaties designed to constrain fiscal sovereignty.

As the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s, the British Empire was threatened by nationalist insurrection in the colonies and by US–Soviet competition for global supremacy. Over the next three decades, the loss of over fifty overseas possessions problematized the country’s dominant narrative of national identity, much of it centered on the wealth and power accumulated by empire. The complex cultural responses to decolonization were typified in literature. On the one hand, diasporic authors from the Global South developed a powerful strand of anti-imperial commentary, illustrated by the work of Sam Selvon, Beryl Gilroy, Andrew Salkey, Attia Hosain, and Grace Nichols. On the other hand, several generations of (largely) white, middle-class English writers stuck to the imperial attitudes of the past, condemning indigenous revolt in the colonies (Evelyn Waugh, Paul Scott, Olivia Manning, P. H. Newby) and objecting to immigration into the metropolis (John Braine, Anthony Burgess, Margot Bennett). While postimperial fiction existed, most famously in novels by George Orwell, Doris Lessing, and Colin MacInnes, postcolonial commentary would have a much greater impact on literary treatments of empire and identity in the twenty-first century.

Many critics today rightly call for “decolonizing” utopia given its undeniable deployment in imperialist as well as liberatory projects. It is more historically accurate to view Thomas More’s Utopia, however, as a site of struggle, especially given the contradiction of considering a society without any conception of private property to be “colonialist” at all. At the very least, we should acknowledge Utopia’s negative form, and the problems that its so-called colonialism is attempting to address before too hastily denouncing utopia as inherently colonialist. Utopia, I argue, is always a site of struggle, a reminder of the difficulty of imagining liberation in a “wrong” world. Early receptions of Utopia in England reveal that it was not embraced by advocates of colonial and propertarian projects; not only was it viewed as an impediment to the unfolding of such agendas while the primitive accumulation of capital was underway, but, revealingly, the values and lifeways of More’s Utopians were often associated with the very peoples being colonized and enslaved, not their colonizers. Failing to understand utopia dialectically, then, not only gives rise to presentist misunderstandings of the past, but problematically limits how it can best be understood to work today.

Justin Reynolds narrates how Christians argued for religious freedom in rights terms at a moment of transatlantic hegemony in the 1940s, divorcing protection for religious practice from that for religious belief. That required abandonment of older models of Christian politics, but the results have been fateful for the regulation since of non-Christians around the world.

Drawing together emerging domestic and regional reform struggles with wider geopolitical developments, this chapter explores a new way to think about the unfolding of rights history. Starting in the later nineteenth century, the forces encouraging growing intergovernmental contact and cooperation through multilateral agreements and codified law – technological and industrial changes, including the spread of ever more deadly weapons, the easing of transport and communications, expanding educational opportunities, and a growing reading public – drew likeminded female and male reformers together in spaces beyond borders through new patterns of transnational mobilizations and formal international organizations. Many local advocates pushing against the limitations of the natural rights traditions of liberal citizenship increasingly drew strength in numbers by transcending existing political arrangements and combining national, regional, and international advocacy.

In daily debates in the UN’s various committees, imperial powers who dominated the previous world order and the postcolonial states that outnumbered them in the next clashed over political and economic sovereignty. These discussions were often about whether a new world order of free and equal states could emerge from a white-dominated world order. Self-determination and its place in international human rights law was a sticking point. Umut Özsu points out that at the height of the decolonization era (1960s–1970s), an irresolvable tension in articulating self-determination with universal human rights left questions of national sovereignty and international order unresolved. Far from being mutually exclusive rival forms of social and political mobilization, human rights and self-determination remain imbricated within the arenas of both international law and social and political activism.

Anne-Isabelle Richard and Stella Krepp discuss regional rights projects through which Latin American and African state and non-state actors tried, with limited success, to position their regions competitively in a politically and economically decolonizing world, even as European regional rights projects shored up the political and economic sovereignty of European states, both at home and in overseas territories. While regional projects invested human rights with local meanings, which was key to their acceptance and adoption across regions, they mostly failed to create the world of non-domination that postcolonial states pursued.