After the Civil War, the American South seemed to be the exception to American exceptionalism. As the late British historian Eric Hobsbawm asserted, after the end of Reconstruction, the South remained “agrarian, poor, backward, and resentful; whites resenting the never-forgotten defeat and blacks the disfranchisement and ruthless subordination imposed by whites when reconstruction ended.” Confederate defeat and the emancipation of slaves left the American South faced with the challenge of embarking upon the “Age of Capital” while largely bereft of capital. This chapter focuses on how the southern capital shortage turned much of the rural South into a “vast pawn shop” with financing for planting crops coming from a mortgage on a crop not yet produced. As beggars for capital, the American South became the ragged stepchild of the industrializing American economy, an economic backwater controlled by outside capital. Active economic legacies of the capital-starved South still haunt the region’s economic landscape in the form of underdeveloped human capital.

This chapter explores the experience of Greece in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis as a lens through which to view the problems women encountered there and in other parts of Europe. The chapter also considers the role that women might play in the progress towards economic recovery from the financial crisis and the more recent COVID-19 pandemic. We advocate measures that address empowerment and development of women in society and not just as economic actors. This matters for sustainable value creation for which the Sustainable Agenda 2030 requires women’s equal representation to influence corporations’ achievement of sustainable value creation and to improve their sustainability performance. From this perspective, our discussion of the role women play and the impact of policies on women brings the gender aspects of value creation under the spotlight and is in keeping with the discourse on sustainability and development internationally, gender equality featuring, for example, as one of the Sustainable Development Goals established in 2015.

Homeless squatting on empty land is a local challenge, replicated on a world-wide scale. While some have argued that neoliberal globalization has had a homogenizing effect on domestic legal systems generally, and on states’ responses to squatting more specifically, domestic institutions retain significant capacity and capability to govern; and their resilience critically determines economic success and political stability and nation-states adapt to changing circumstances. This chapter frames our analyses of state responses to homeless squatting on empty land in the context of nation state norms and narratives: what we describe – adapting Robert Cover – as the property “nomos” of each jurisdiction. We argue that state responses to squatting are framed by the “foundational” regime goals through which the state’s role and relationships to citizens with respect to property were articulated and understood, and examine how these foundational goals with respect to private property, housing and citizenship emerged in each of the five primary jurisdictions from which we draw insights and illustrations in this book: the United States of America, Ireland, Spain, South Africa, and England and Wales. In doing so, we aim to better understand how domestic institutions, norms and narratives in each of these jurisdictions have shaped the nomos within which “the state” acts in response to homeless squatting on empty land.

This chapter contextualizes contemporary Asian American literature in its innovative development of generic traditions, a ubiquitous screen culture and transmedia landscape, and the persistence of feminized cultural forms in the neoliberal global economy. It summarizes the constraints and possibilities that Asian American authors encounter when they write in the contemporary idiom of popular genres that target readers as women. Authors deploy forms aware of limitations and with the aim of engaging in dialogue about the belonging that popular literature addresses, both by design in a literary culture that neoliberal governance calls upon to offer templates for citizenship, and through authors’ and readers’ disidentification with exploitative mandates for entrepreneurial labor and instrumentalized intimacy. Drawing on affect theory to highlight romantic consumerism, emotional management, and individual investment in contemporary literary culture, the chapter considers how popular forms may challenge these features and analyzes the South Asian American example of Shilpa Somaya Gowda’s international bestselling novel Secret Daughter. The chapter argues that, rather than naturalize feminized and racialized affective labor as fundamental to neoliberal capitalism, Asian American women’s literature in many cases critically stages it, presenting affective labor that gestures toward a post-work imaginary and a different future.