This chapter traces the maturation of Palermo’s architectural idiom across a network of local churches in the Kalsa and Loggia districts. Designed in collaboration with itinerant architects from southeastern Sicily and the Iberian Mediterranean, these early sixteenth-century monuments bear the mark of local builders and craftsmen fluent in ornamental and structural solutions inherited from the Normans. In Palermo’s contested cultural environment, building sites became laboratories for the development of a speculative architecture that tested the limits of architectural revivalism. Local practices of vernacularization and historicization developed against the backdrop of the city’s rich humanistic tradition, which creatively reimagined Palermo’s proximate and distant pasts.

This chapter lays the foundation for the book by providing a brief overview of colonization, racialization, and coercive labor mechanisms in British Guiana. The entangled histories of dispossession, enslavement, and indenture frame this chapter’s exploration of how difference was produced, how “divide and rule” operated, and how the sugar industry came to dominate the political life of the colony. The chapter closes with a discussion of the 1928 decision to adopt Crown Colony government. A small white elite, fearing the expansion of a tiny but growing electorate of color, opted out of the then barely representative system of government and placed decision-making firmly in the hands of the Crown. Through an examination of colonial correspondence, the politics of the census, legal documents, newspaper articles, and missionary records, this chapter provides an analysis of the nature of British colonialism in the first third of the twentieth century, which contends that the racialization of the laboring population developed from governance built on dispossession, captive labor, segregation, taxonomy, and law.

While immaterial labor characterizes so much of the work undertaken within typically western core states this brief Afterword thinks about the unequal development and division of labor globally. If the division of labor is central to the capitalist world-systemthen the narration of labor as tragic might extend to world literature. Following this leadthe chapter turns to the work of Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to think provisionally about how the enclosing between a core and periphery is constitutive to an idea of the United States that is itself tragic.

‘Irish Fiction and Migration in the Long Twenty-First Century’ observes that while migration has been a topic prominent in Irish fiction since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, more recent novels have considered the Irish subject overseas as a product of what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘liquid modernity’, migrants in a world characterised by neoliberalism and globalisation. The chapter considers works of outward migration in the long twenty-first century, beginning with William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey (1994) and extending to later works, such as Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009) and E. M. Reapy’s Red Dirt (2016), as well as historical fiction including Roddy Doyle’s Oh, Play That Thing (2004). The flows of migration into Ireland are also considered, in relation to Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015), Oona Frawley’s Flight (2014), and Donal Ryan’s Strange Flowers (2020), concluding that recent Irish diasporic fiction is characterised by multiple displacements.

‘Serial Publication and the Transatlantic Irish Novel’ focuses on the inextricable link between the flourishing of the Irish novel in the nineteenth century and the development of periodical publication. As the number of novels published in Ireland increased over the century, so too did the trade in books increase, so that by mid century there was an active transatlantic trade in books, with increasing numbers of Irish novels written specifically for American readers. Novels by authors including Mary Anne Sadlier and William Carleton were published on both sides of the Atlantic, and several of them also addressed the concerns of the Irish in North America. This allows us to adjust backwards our timeline for transnationalism, usually considered a late twentieth-century phenomenon. At the same time, it needs to be recognised that this increase in print culture contributed to the development of nationalism, in terms familiar from the work of Benedict Anderson.

‘Religion, Migration and the Irish Novel’ considers the way in which the bitter sectarian divisions that characterised Irish society in the nineteenth century were both reflected in and produced by the fiction of the period. Novels such as William Parnell’s Maurice and Berghetta: or, the Priest of Rahery (1819) were written with the clear intention of repealing the Penal Laws that restricted the rights of Irish Catholics, while Selina Bunbury’s The Abbey of Innismoyle (1828) uses Gothic tropes of abduction by malicious friars to stoke Protestant fears of Catholic conspiracies. These sectarian divisions were reinforced for Irish migrants in novels such as Mary Anne Sadlier’s New Lights (1853), a Famine novel that pits a charitable Catholic priest against a rapacious Protestant evangelical, and which was published in New York for Irish-American readers, taking its place with Irish-American novels such as Peter McCorry’s The Lost Rosary (1870).

This chapter examines the challenges of defining anti-fascist musical aesthetics, arguing that anti-fascism resists fixed ideological or stylistic categorisation. Rather than a coherent doctrine, anti-fascism emerges as a diverse and flexible response to fascism’s perceived rigidity and identitarianism. Focusing on mid-twentieth-century refugee artists across literature, music, and film, the chapter highlights the centrality of migration and exile in shaping anti-fascist artistic practices. Drawing on authors such as Klaus Mann and Walter Benjamin, it frames anti-fascist aesthetics as the politicisation of art, in contrast to fascism’s aestheticisation of politics. Case studies—including works by Hanns Eisler and migrant filmmakers—demonstrate how mobility, displacement, and formal experimentation function as key aesthetic strategies. Ultimately, the chapter proposes that anti-fascist aesthetics are best understood not as a unified style, but as a heterogeneous, migratory practice that challenges ideological fixity and foregrounds diversity as a form of resistance.

This chapter is a comparative long-term community study of Muslim Roma who migrated from North Macedonia to New York City starting in the 1960s and who now number several thousand people. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, it illustrates the multiple identities of varied community members via family, work, ritual and cultural productions. It especially examines music as a window into community expression; tellingly, song lyrics often deal with migration. Music is highly valued in all social occasions and as part of the ritual and economic web. Music is shared in a wide transatlantic social media network that forms the soundscape of Macedonian Romani family and community life. In fact, some musicians are the most mobile members of their communities. Ethnographic fieldwork from which this chapter has developed took place among Macedonian Roma in North Macedonia, the United States, Western Europe, Canada and Australia since 1988.

This Introduction provides a condensed telling of five hundred years of Romani history within an Atlantic context. It illustrates that Romani people have been part of the modern Atlantic world and that the Atlantic world has shaped the Romani diaspora and Romani people’s sense of who they are. Stories of Atlantic circulations, interactions, connections and exchanges show how Romani people and ideas held about them, transcended empires, nations and borders. The Introduction specifically contextualizes three moments of visibility. During the early modern era, Romani people experienced (often forced) population movements as part of imperial expansions and prompted the translation of European antigypsyism in the context of colonialism, slavery, capitalism, Indigenous genocides and emerging racial thought. At the turn of the twentieth century, nationalistic immigration controls provoked a heightened recognition of Romani people that impacted their experiences, forms of sociability and strategies of mobility. After World War II, as transnational migrants and refugees, they garnered new attention and built diasporic communities in the face of novel and changing international circumstances. Adding Romani people to Atlantic history allows us to think differently about the Atlantic world and transforms our understanding of Romani lived experiences.

Compares those to whom the US government denies nonimmigrant visas to those it grants such visas in order to show how officers are more likely to deny visas to those who tell surveyors would not immigrate if they had the opportunity to do so whereas they are more likely to grant visas to those who told surveyors they would immigrate if they had an opportunity – contrary to what US immigration law ostensibly mandates visa officers to do. Officers are more likely to grant visas to those who possess indicators of what I define as (im)mobility capital. Such (im)mobility capital consists of only a subset of many measures of socioeconomic status and social ties, such as high levels of formal education, extensive travel experience, attendance at a selective school, and the number of years at their current job. The components I identified to comprise (im)mobility capital are also associated with whether a (non)immigrant visa applicant would be willing to spend more than half of the rest of their life in the country of destination if they had the opportunity. Adjudication about who to deny visas to by US visa officers is similar to how consulates of other countries operate.

Potential immigrants do not even apply for a visa because they also confront social forces from the community bearing on their families that deter them from leaving. Many young adults become deterred from migrating not merely from visa requirements, but also due to opposition and pressure from the family. Despite how most of China has a patrilocal kinship system and culture that more strongly sanctions men from marrying outside their bloodline, Chinese parents are much more likely to oppose women going abroad than men, even if this opposition decreases as they age. Aside from overt opposition children may face, many women specifically are discouraged from migrating abroad or even traveling abroad due to concerns about their daughter’s physical safety, socioeconomic dependence on their parents, and societal peer pressure. Such concerns are particularly strong in the patriarchal context of China as it is mediated by a traditional filial duty amongst the one-child-only generation toward their parents and the intense influence that parents exercise over the educational, career, and marital choices of their adult children – both of which have a stronger deterrent effect on daughters than on sons.