We have already explored the Harlem Renaissance, a period in which African American artists, writers, and intellectuals forged new cultural expressions that challenged white normative standards and reimagined Black identity. In this chapter, we will see how the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s built on that intellectual and cultural groundwork, translating ideas of freedom, self-determination, and racial pride into mass political action. The Civil Rights era was the largest and most sustained movement of popular protest in US history, and it offers readers an opportunity to understand how African Americans mobilized to confront Jim Crow, reframe citizenship, and envision a more just democracy.

In this chapter, we will encounter the multiple ideological currents within the movement: nonviolent civil disobedience, Black nationalism, and Black Power. Figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and grassroots organizations like SNCC exemplified these different approaches. Whereas the Harlem Renaissance sought to assert Black cultural value in a society defined by white supremacy, the Civil Rights era assumed Black political agency and interrogated its implications in a society still dominated by racial hierarchy.

This chapter introduces readers to the formative ideas and debates of nineteenth-century African American political thought. This period covers the era of antislavery activism before the US Civil War (1861–65), which abolished slavery, to the immediate aftermath of that period, known as Reconstruction (1865–77). It was in this latter period in which the US federal government intervened militarily and economically in the US South to ensure newly emancipated Black citizens would have their freedoms protected. Through figures such as David Walker, Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Frances Harper, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany, readers will learn how Black thinkers confronted slavery, racial hierarchy, and gender oppression while generating some of the most influential theories of freedom and equality in American history.

A central learning objective of this chapter is to show how political theory emerges not only from institutions but also from lived experience, moral outrage, and collective struggle. By the end of the chapter, readers will be able to explain how African American political thought identified the contradictions at the heart of American democracy and articulated powerful visions for racial justice and human liberation.

This chapter contrasts two perspectives for understanding workplace resistance: a managerialist perspective that treats resistance chiefly as ‘resistance to change’ – a behavioural, individualised problem to be managed – and a critical perspective that locates resistance in relations of power, structural conflict, and workers’ claims to autonomy and dignity. Using seven analytical categories (position, needs, interests, power, level of analysis, rationality, theoretical tradition), the chapter shows how managerialist accounts naturalise authority, infantilise workers, and depoliticise dissent, whereas critical traditions (Labour Process Theory, Critical Management Studies, Critical Leadership Studies) begin from the subordinate standpoint, reconceive oppositional practices as rational and morally significant, and define resistance as organisational misbehaviour directed upwards in the hierarchy. The chapter concludes that managerialist knowledge legitimises control and narrows inquiry, while the critical lens restores conceptual clarity and ethical depth, treating resistance as an enduring, constitutive feature of organisational life rather than a pathology to be eliminated.

On 1 July 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte’s army landed near Alexandria; by the end of the month he had crushed local forces outside Cairo in a fearsome display of firepower and discipline. In spite of French claims to be sympathetic towards Islam their brief governance of Egypt was characterised by ignorance and brutality towards the local population. One observer framed his views in a particularly pointed fashion: ‘The Egyptians could not remotely stand the French because of differences of religion, language and clothes; not to mention the old enmity that had existed between them since the time of the Sultan Baybars. The troops of King Louis of France came to their defeat here at the hands of the Muslim army [1250], and the memory of this is perpetuated by the name given to the town – Mansurah (meaning ‘the victorious’).’

What if change isn’t the answer but the illusion? Chapter 8 introduces the persistence perspective, which casts a critical eye over the assumption that transformation is always possible – or even desirable. Instead of celebrating change, this view foregrounds its limits: the weight of history, the grip of routine, and the subtle power of inertia. Drawing on ideas like path dependency, structural inertia, and escalating commitment, the chapter explores why many change efforts stall, fail, or serve more symbolic than substantive purposes. Change, here, is not a heroic quest – it’s often a struggle against deeply embedded forces. By spotlighting continuity, resistance, and the politics of surface-level reform, this chapter invites readers to rethink when change is truly necessary – and when persistence might be the wiser path.

This chapter explores music in Vichy France through four intertwined portraits that illuminate resistance, propaganda, and tragic irony under occupation. Three sections examine musical dissent through La France libre, the Front national des musiciens, and the BBC’s Radio Londres, showing how concerts, folk songs, satire, and parody fostered solidarity and morale while circumventing censorship. Activities ranged from the folk-song choir Les Chanteurs à la Croix de Lorraine to Maurice Van Moppès’s biting chansons, broadcast and even parachuted into France as Chansons de la BBC. Central to this narrative is the composer Elsa Barraine, whose clandestine leadership and polemical writing exemplify the moral and personal risks of cultural resistance. The fourth portrait turns to collaboration, tracing the Vichy anthem ‘Maréchal, nous voilà!’ to its likely plagiarism of a song by the Jewish composer Kazimierz Oberfeld, later murdered in Auschwitz.

The war years were also important for political opposition members imprisoned in Nazi Germany during the Third Reich. Chapter 3 focuses on two networks of resisters: Hermann Brill and the socialist resistance in Buchenwald, and Georg August Zinn’s “Red Shock-Troop” resistance group in the early Third Reich. This chapter stresses the popular front aspects of the anti-Nazi resistance. Anti-Nazis within Germany tried to create alliances with communists; however, the search for a popular front failed in the postwar. Disgust with the lack of a German resistance led key anti-Nazis to embrace an “authoritarian democracy” in the postwar as a denazification measure until Germany was ready for a democracy. In the case of Hermann Brill, the idea of a popular front only disappeared at the hands of persecution by the Soviet occupation government. Finally, the chapter looks at several Christian converts in Nazi Germany who were persecuted as “racial Jews” by the Nazi regime. These jurists were persecuted for an identity that they never held as their own.

This chapter explores the experiences of Romani women (Gitanas) in the Spanish Atlantic empire through the lens of inquisitorial records from the seventeenth century. Centering the 1668 trial of María de la Concepción in Veracruz, it investigates how Gitanas navigated the complex religious, social and political landscapes of colonial society. By comparing inquisitorial cases from both Spain and New Spain, the chapter argues that colonial governance was less rigid than its peninsular counterpart, creating spaces in which Gitanas could engage in love magic, healing practices and other ritualized forms of knowledge. Operating in liminal zones across ethnoracial and class boundaries, these women provided services to a wide range of clients. Their practices functioned as both survival strategies and subtle forms of resistance against imperial and ecclesial authorities. The chapter demonstrates that Gitanas leveraged their ambiguous social position to subvert normative boundaries of ethnicity, gender and class, particularly by facilitating relationships that unsettled colonial hierarchies and exposed the permeability of imperial control.

Chapter 8 discusses the dim future that is implied by the findings of this book. If politicians previously felt that they had to tread lightly when negatively stereotyping minoritized ethnoracial groups and mobilizing white racism, that no longer appears to be the case. We are in the midst of witnessing this change in US politics, with Donald Trump's successful capture of the Republican Party. This book demonstrates, though, that this phenomenon is not specific to any one politician or political moment. Instead, it is inherent to whiteness itself. Understanding the conditions under which negative racial appeals flourish, as this book has sought to do, is a first step in combatting the kind of rhetoric that functions to reify white dominance and the unequal racial hierarchy in the US.

How has the Mashriq, as a geopolitical and poetic space shaped by colonial legacies, protracted wars, and literary resistance, been imagined? Focusing on South Lebanon, the chapter examines how poets like Abbas Beydoun and Jawdat Fakhreddine reimagine the region’s ruins not as symbols of loss but as sites of resistance and memory. Through close readings of their poetry, it traces how classical Arabic motifs – especially aṭlāl (ruins) – are reworked to confront Israeli occupation and the silencing of the South in dominant literary narratives, arguing that these poets forge a counter-archive that challenges Beiruti-centric war literature and reclaims the South as a central locus of cultural production. In doing so, the chapter situates the Mashriq within a broader framework of anticolonial poetics, where literature becomes a form of witnessing, survival, and political imagination.

Chapter 16 explores the theme of modern Indigenous peoples through five novels: Quarup (1967) by Antônio Calado, Maíra (1976) by Darcy Ribeiro, Nove noites (2002) by Bernardo de Carvalho, O som do rugido da onça (2020) by Micheliny Verunschk, and O que falam as águas (2022) by Ezequiel Vitor Tuxá. It opens by placing nineteenth-century Romantic indianismo alongside its early twentieth-century modernista counterpart, setting the stage for an analysis of Indigenous-themed novels published after the 1960s. While these works share certain themes, they do not form a unified group, as they vary widely in how they approach Indigenous issues. For example, themes of resistance and activism appear only in novels written after the 1988 Brazilian constitution, particularly in those by Verunschk and Tuxá. These two writers, however, offer notably different viewpoints, with Tuxá standing out as the only Indigenous author featured in this chapter.

Growing up in a racial hierarchy that favors Whiteness and stigmatizes Blackness exposes young individuals to racial marginalization and discrimination. Racial discrimination has become a regular occurrence for most Black children and adolescents in the United States, resulting in negative impacts on their social, emotional, academic, and physical well-being. Nevertheless, these experiences also enable young people to strengthen their racial identities, form communities, and work towards Black liberation. In this chapter, we begin by placing Black youth development within the sociohistorical and political context of anti-Black racism. Subsequently, we discuss the various definitions and methodological considerations in discrimination research. Furthermore, we briefly explore how young individuals interpret racial discrimination and the strategies they employ to combat racism. We then focus on three collective resistance strategies that create space for Black liberation within the realms of family, education, and media: (1) socialization, (1) rest and being, and (3) imagination and dream-building.