Moving away from the grassroots version of events, this chapter explores the official colonial narratives created about the 1935 rebellions and the nature of British imperialism, arguing that the colonial government essentially operated as an extension of the sugar estates. Because of the entrenchment of racial stereotypes, the cross-racial cooperation fundamental to the rebellions seemed implausible to colony officials and was therefore rendered invisible. This chapter demonstrates the racial and ideological anxieties of colonialism itself and the global fractures within the British Empire during this period, where activists made connections between fascism and colonialism.

The first part of this chapter’s title paraphrases the key sentence from a sermon in which a Presbyterian minister compared southern Protestants to the ancient Hebrews in their Babylonian exile, and in particular to Daniel, who kept his windows – and mind – open towards the Promised Land. Applied to minorities in interwar Ireland, it was both an exhortation and a statement: Irish Protestants and Jews looked beyond Ireland’s shores for their inspiration, like exiles groaning for a promised land. Inherently transnational groups such as Jews and Irish Protestants generated explicitly internationalist politics, accompanied by a rhetoric of social reform at home, often by means of ecumenical endeavour. While both internationalism and social reform were inspired by the then widespread revulsion against the First World War, for most people there was a persistent attachment to the British Empire and a desire to express it without provoking a republican backlash. The chapter’s last part examines minority internationalism as it engaged with the ultimate secular utopia of their day – the Soviet Union – or, rather, the way it was perceived and represented by admirers like Sean O’Casey and Rosamond Jacob.

For poets Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, and Jayne Cortez, jazz indexes a series of paradoxes and contradictions beyond standard accounts of the music and, in turn, beyond standard accounts of jazz poetry. In Joans’s live collaboration with saxophonist Archie Shepp We Have Come Back, the multiple versions of Kaufman’s ‘War Memoir’, and Cortez’s ‘If the Drum Is a Woman’, jazz reveals contradictions of racial, gendered, and national belonging in the Black Arts Movement era. These poems do not simply imitate jazz rhythms, but conceive jazz as a social form, part of the raced, classed, and sexed negotiations of bohemian community. Jazz becomes a way of thinking about practices of listening, about the way that art and cultural practices encapsulate the values of overlapping communities, and about the way that such practices serve as contested terrain. Drawing both prosodic energy and symbolic strength from jazz, these are also poems about jazz, about the stakes of listening to, consuming, appropriating, and appreciating the music, and about its role in the complex politics of the eras of McCarthyism, decolonisation, and the renewed rise of Black art.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, a writer with the last name “Du Bois” helped articulate the shifting contours and geographies of Pan African and Black anti-imperialist literature. This chapter charts the evolving understanding of Black anti-imperialism within evolving geopolitical conjunctures in W.E.B. Du Bois’s, Dark Princess; Shirley Graham Du Bois’s journal articles, short biographies, and political speeches; and David Graham Du Bois’s novel …And Bid Him Sing. This Du Bois genealogy exemplifies the shifting terrain of Pan-African literature and the politics of Black anti-imperialism in the era of Three Worlds. The chapter tracks the awakening of Black anti-imperialism in the context of global 1930s, the Third World terrain of the 1950s, and the African American Third World left of the 1960s and beyond.

Gaining resonance from 1918, pacifism joined socialist internationalism and Communists’ novel militancy. The League of Nations drew much of that sentiment, from refugees and humanitarian relief through public health and the ILO to nutritional science and development economics, claiming economic planning, scientific and technological transfer, and humanitarian cooperation for new networked expertise. Self-consciously “Europeanist” initiatives formed, including fascist ideas of a united European “great space” under Mussolini and Hitler. By 1936–1939, imperialist visions of a New Europe made population politics key to international revisionism, exchanging self-determination and minority protections for greater-national expansion and population removal. Brutally radicalized by the Nazis’ Kristallnacht (November 1938), antisemitism became a violent driver. In 1937–1941, anti-Jewish laws reversed earlier emancipation – from Poland and Romania, through Italy and Hungary, to Czecho-Slovakia, Croatia, and Vichy France. That was the ugly backcloth to Hitler’s drive for war. In September 1939, vitally enabled by Franco-British appeasement and the Nazi–Soviet Pact, Hitler invaded Poland.

This essay gathers the political, literary, and historical significance of India in the poems, memoirs, and articles of Pablo Neruda. It shows that the poet’s career in the subcontinent exceeded and rejected a mystifying Indophilia. Instead, the internationalist framework of Neruda’s two sojourns in India (1927–28 and 1950) corresponds to two major phases of his political thought: decolonization and the anti-imperialist peace movement. Neruda’s refusal of Indophilia brought him closer to Indian writers of English, Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, and Kannada and to Indian visual artists. “The Grapes of History” (“Las uvas de la historia”), an image from his long poem on India from 1951, has fructified and fermented in the reflections and translations of Nerudiana among major writers (Ali Sardar Jafri, Shamsher Bahadur Singh, Kunwar Narain, and Arundhati Roy) and artists (Chittaprosad Bhattacharya and Vivan Sundaram) long after the poet’s passing, well into the twenty-first century.

The fin de siècle’s newly emerging scientific discourse of homosexuality was part and parcel of a broader tension between ‘materialists’ and ‘spiritualists.’ Whereas the former believed that human agency was fatally compromised by the determining influence of hardwired compulsions, the latter insisted on the existence of free will and man’s higher calling to resist basic impulses. For this reason, the notion of congenital homosexuality was an unacceptably radical one to the spiritualist faction of liberals and Catholics, which dominated among Belgian intellectuals and policymakers. Like those abroad, Belgian spiritualists associated the notion of inborn homosexuality with socialism in general and with the left-leaning French Third Republic in particular. This chapter zooms in on a series of international conferences to demonstrate how deeply interwoven the issue of homosexuality was with wider ideological tensions. It also shows why in Belgium the issue was sidelined so that its controversial nature would not stand in the way of penal reform.

The chapter develops a genealogy of the notion of moral autopsy that has become the major mode of knowing, judging, and relating to the socialist past in post-Cold War Eastern Europe and beyond, particularly in the context of transitional justice. The chapter traces moral autopsy’s historical and conceptual sources within the post-Cold War context, marked by the proclamations of the “end of history,” celebrations of the rule of law and human rights, conservative historical revisionism and criminalization of communism, the “moral turn,” competitive memory politics based on national victimhood, and neoliberal globalization. Through a detailed analysis of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance and the posthumous media lustration of the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, especially the questions of secrecy, truth, and treachery raised about him, the chapter shows how moral autopsy constructs a transhistorical, judicialized, and criminalized account of communism that ultimately impoverishes the understanding of social-historical relations of power, informational practices, ideology, and political subjectivity concerning state socialism and Cold War socialist internationalism.

This chapter examines how Bloomsbury and music intersected at the figure of Edward J. Dent, the Cambridge music scholar. It offers Dent as an embodiment of which Bloomsbury and early twentieth-century musical culture in England and Europe were mutually constitutive, using him as a point for comparison to gauge Bloomsbury’s musical enthusiasm and sensibility. The chapter first surveys existing musical-literary criticism within studies of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. It then explores the overlaps between Dent and Bloomsbury on issues including non-European musical cultures, sexuality, personal relationship, modernist aesthetics, music as a performing art, international politics, education, and state funding. Following a discussion of Dent’s involvement during and after the Second World War in John Maynard Keynes’ work on “national” opera, the chapter ends with Keynes by examining one of his letters to the BBC as an epitome of music’s protean role in Bloomsbury.

Chapter 1 offers a historical introduction as well as an overview of existing research in the field. It argues that by mapping out the trajectories of former volunteer soldiers, it is possible to see the many ways in which the Spanish Civil War and the broader anti-fascist engagement of the inter-war period could constitute a transformative experience and event; an event that expanded volunteers’ political horizons and gradually opened up possibilities for border-crossing political engagement in the post-war era. Thus, it sets the stage for the case studies constituting the main part of the book, showing that the political and military influence of the volunteers in Spain did not necessarily come to an end in 1938/1939 or even in 1945. In a few yet significant cases, it stretched across the globe far into the Cold War period.

This chapter examines the crucial seven-year period between Stimson’s resignation as secretary of state in March 1933 and his return to the War Department in June 1940. Although Stimson did not anticipate he would ever return to Washington to serve in the federal government, some of his most important public service occurred when he was a private citizen in this period. Particularly, this chapter advances two critical arguments. The first is that Stimson had both a much wider definition of national security than most of his contemporaries did and came to those conclusions before nearly any other American leader or opinion maker. The second argument is that attempting to neatly define Stimson’s internationalism is difficult. Stimson borrowed ideas from the legalistic, moralistic, and New Deal-style categories of internationalism and repackaged them into his own fusion that called for US leadership to manage the world.