This chapter considers the relationship between composing and nationality, examining what happens when musical influence and practice are reimagined across traditions and cultures. It looks at several case studies to unpick geographical, social, political, and racial musical associations, and reflects critically on composing outside the colonial dominance of Western-centric musical practices.

The children of Afghan refugees provide important insight into the way that universities can be crucial sites of racial formation. This chapter explores how second-generation Afghan American college students navigate their racial and ethnic identities and build community on a college campus. The results are drawn from a qualitative study conducted at George Mason University, located in Northern Virginia, which is home to one of the largest Afghan diaspora populations in the country. Findings revealed the disparate impact that the withdrawal of the US military and subsequent arrival of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees into the United States had on students, the role of family and collectivist culture in their decision-making, how ethnic student organizations were a method of ethnic preservation and co-ethnic support, and how attending a university with a large Afghan student population exposed internal conflicts within the community. This chapter provides important insight for universities aiming to create inclusive environments and support the diverse experiences of second-generation immigrants, Muslim, and Afghan American students.

Young Black changemakers take pride in their connection to Black communities of past and present. This strong and positive Black identity motivates their changemaking. Black identity intertwines with other identities – such as gender and social class positions – to inform experiences of oppression and changemaking in response. Commitment to and love for Black communities empowers young Black people to cope with and resist racism in ways that protect their personal identities from threat and draw on the strengths of their personal narratives. Young Black changemakers find civic purpose and power in the legacy of Black social justice leaders and lean into that history to honor their place in Black communities. The relationship between identity and changemaking is reciprocal. For these young people, pride and connection to being Black fed their desire to eradicate racism through changemaking. Engaging in changemaking for a better world for Black people also deepened their connections to Black people and Black communities.

Recent discussions in Irish geopolitics have often been coded in spatial language, particularly in the recurring motif of soil. For instance, Ireland was the last country in Europe to grant citizenship on the basis of jus soli (“right of soil”) until the 2004 referendum made citizenship determined by the nationality of one’s parents (jus sanguinis or “right of blood”). Or to take a more recent example: one of the great dangers posed by Brexit is the possibility of creating a “hard border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic. This essay traces how the motif of soil has been central to conceptions of Irish national and racial identity, from The Nation’s famed motto, “To foster a public opinion and make it racy of the soil,” to Seamus Heaney’s infamous bog poems, which wrestle with themes of kinship, lineage, and soil. I argue that such spatial language must be read as more than just figurative and instead as revealing the material relationships between race, place, and geopolitics, which have been and will continue to be crucial to Ireland’s global identity.

This chapter discusses the direct effects of racial discrimination on Black Americans’ health. It begins by documenting that daily exposure to the various forms of racial discrimination is a common experience for Black people living in the United States. Encountering racial discrimination creates stress, which activates physiological stress responses – bodily systems that normally provide person with the energy needed to rapidly reduce the stress. However, the stress created by racial discrimination is usually chronic because many Black Americans repeatedly experience racial discrimination over a prolonged period of time. When the bodily systems activated by stress response remain active, it creates a harmful physical condition – allostatic overload. Allostatic overload is responsible for a host of physical illnesses, including heart diseases, diabetes, and immune disorders. It is also associated with poorer mental health, as well as alterations in epigenetics, such as premature aging. Chronic stress can also cause people to engage in behaviors that may provide short-term emotional relief from discrimination-related stress but are unhealthy, such as drug use or eating certain unhealthy “comfort” foods. In sum, prolonged exposure to racial discrimination is a chronic stressor that threatens the health of Black Americans.

From the nineteenth century to the present and covering a range of novelistic styles, Australians have sought imaginative possibilities in the Asia Pacific region. This chapter draws upon an extensive database of Australian writing on Asia to map the variety and range of Australian fiction set in or dealing with Asia. Main genres include invasion novels, which date from the late nineteenth century; a growing body of popular fiction, drawing at first on Asian settings and later employing Asian characters; fiction drawing on narratives of travel; and explorations of Australia’s evolving identity as a predominantly white nation in an Asian region. This chapter is structured around seven key texts which illustrate key themes and modes of writing.

Dismantling systems of racial oppression requires that people from many different racial and ethnic backgrounds become critically conscious in challenging racial injustices. Youth’s pathways to critical consciousness may be very different depending on youth’s experiences with racial oppression and privilege. This chapter brings together relational developmental systems and critical race and intersectionality theories and existing research that can offer insights into different underpinnings and processes related to youth of color and white youth’s critical consciousness development. We also show how mapping complex variations in critical reflection, motivation, and action and situating these processes within contexts of oppression and privilege can advance understanding of critical consciousness development. We conclude by summarizing promising future directions for theory and research.

Structural racism requires racialized economic agents. Racial identities are a strategically determined social norm, designed for governing differential access to resources, especially wealth, power, and information, as well as protection from other-group antagonism. When applied to the labor market, the differential power of racial groups means that racial identity is a sorting mechanism, such that persons of otherwise equal productive capacity will have racially differential access to employment, compensation, promotion, training, and the probability of layoff according to the manager–worker identity match. Racial identity norms evolve from social interactions between and among persons of alternative ancestral groups. Within these interactions persons select strategies that strengthen or weaken racial identity norms. These social interactions increase the productivity of persons if they are mutually altruistic. Mutually antagonistic social interactions reduce each person’s productivity. Racialization is an ongoing process of social and economic evolution. Self-identification and labeling conventions are social norms that emerge to distinguish social groups. Both actual and perceived skin shade and other physical differences are imprecise and subjective.

Similar to changes that occurred during the Nadir, for the decades since the 1973–1975 recession, African American – White wage and family income inequality has remained stagnant, despite unambiguous progress in the average quantity and quality of African American education relative to White Americans. This progress was due do African American self-help, school desegregation, and increase in the years of free education. But, the Black–White college degree gap has increased since the demise of Jim Crow; this increase is explained by racial wealth differences.

The introduction explains the subject and purpose of this study, placing it in its historiographical contexts, which includes the history of the racial identity of the Italians, the history of the continuities of fascist and colonial racism in post-fascist and post-colonial Italy, and the history of Black Italy. I illustrate the specificities of the story of the Italian “brown babies” within the larger framework of post-World War II Europe, foregrounding the persistence of racial ideology in post-fascist Italy and the continuing racial subtext of Italian national identity, in spite of the emergence of ant-iracist sensibilities. The introduction also provides an overview of the book chapters.

Crucially, moreover, Roth wrote across a remarkable and volatile period in Jewish American history throughout which race was explicitly foregrounded as an issue. These are events from which his fiction –despite its markedly unstable rapport with reality – should not be abstracted. Yet a curiously inverted relationship reigns between the titanic number of Roth’s black characters, and the critical Roth scholarship on race. Articles and chapters on race represent the barest handful of what is otherwise a prodigious body of criticism. Recently, Philip Roth Studies devoted a special issue to “Roth and Race,” but no one has yet published an entire book that systematically treats and charts the appearance of characters of color or the numerous meanings of race in Roth.In this essay we hope to tease out some productive avenues toward such a text.

Chapter Five continues the discussion of slaveholders' efforts to limit the rights and standing of free blacks. It looks closely at the 1850s, when Louisianan and Virginian slaveholders built a white man’s democracy in which whiteness was the sole basis for political power and free people of color could never be citizens. The legislatures of Virginia and Louisiana sought to isolate and degrade people of color in every realm of the public sphere, shutting down their institutions, such as churches and schools. In Cuba, where the colonial state could not afford to alienate the free black population and where black freedom was not linked to white man’s democracy, free people of color managed to withstand the slaveholders’ assault on their traditional rights and institutions. Regulations based on race rather than status predictably led to litigation over racial identity, and the chapter compares trials of racial identity and cases of interracial marriage. Whereas courts in the U.S. drew tight connections between whiteness and the possibility of citizenship, the Cuban courts held out the possibility that a person of color could be honorable and marry across the color line.