This chapter analyzes the regulation of sexual desire as one aspect of the process of progressive centralization through which the papacy affirmed its control over the Catholic Church and society across the centuries. While the accusation of homosexual behavior was increasingly associated with forms of religious and social nonconformity, the prohibition of homosexual intercourse became an instrument for encouraging ecclesiastics’ and lay people’s increasing examination of their individual consciences. The control of same-sex desire thus favored the internalization of a disciplinary attitude that hierarchically emanated from the center to the periphery. As a response to the increased visibility of sexual and gender minorities, nowadays the issue of same-sex marriage is demanding increased attention. The issue has never been discussed more thoroughly by popes as it has been in the last decades. Despite some significative epistemological shifts, however, the doctrinal approach towards this matter has remained strikingly consistent, and homosexuality is still condemned by the Catholic Church as a disordered inclination.

The immorality of the ancient Romans is a commonplace in modern representations of Roman antiquity. In nineteenth-century history painting, twentieth-century sword and sandal movies and twenty-first-century TV shows alike, inebriated Roman voluptuaries lounge on their couches surrounded by gleaming marble, while they savour exotic foods and grope scantily dressed women and boys.Romans behaving badly certainly have box-office appeal but the details of their excesses in the modern imaginary are deeply rooted in the preoccupations of cultural commentators in Roman antiquity. The speeches of Cicero, the histories of Sallust, Livy and Tacitus, the philosophical works of Seneca, the Elder Pliny’s observations about the natural world – all these texts (and more) return obsessively to the vices of their authors’ fellow Romans, charting their sexual misbehaviour, their insatiable desire for luxury, their inability to subordinate their own pleasure to the public good.

Critical discussions of the novel of ideas have often asked us to take seriously the ideas articulated by fictional characters, and assumed that these ideas are sincerely held by those characters. This is in fact a good description of the serious novel of ideas, whose formal dynamics can be mapped onto theories of tragedy by Hegel, Lukács, and David Scott. But often, comedy and hypocrisy disrupt the presumed continuity between public utterances and private convictions or behaviours. This also often involves disrupting essentialist conceptions of identity and group belonging. Through readings of novels by Rose Macaulay, Doris Lessing, Jonathan Coe and Jeanette Winterson, this chapter argues that comic novels of ideas thrive on such discontinuities, diffusing and deflating identity categories as well as tragic collisions, and offering a distinctive orientation towards discursive liberalism as the primary medium of politics.

In conversation with her English translator Chris Campbell, playwright Magali Mougel broaches two main issues dominating theatre in France today. With regard to identity politics, she remarks that theatre-makers from communities that have historically been minoritized owing to gender, ethnicity, ‘race’ or other protected characteristics tend to prefer not only to write plays but also to direct and perform them in order to have control over the images portrayed and to ensure that discriminatory clichés do not creep back onstage. Mougel’s reflections transition from representation to the material conditions of theatre-making as she describes a sector beyond the main national theatres, which is increasingly underfunded and where burnout for the part of artists, technicians and administrators is a real concern.

The final chapter brings us back to the contemporary political dilemmas we face today and discusses how the recovery of premodern conceptions of the nation helps us think through the challenge of national pluralism and resurging nationalist sentiment. It encourages openness to some virtues of empire as a multinational form of politics, considers the merits of a pluralistic political order, and suggests new avenues for cultivating democratic solidarity in diverse polities. In particular, the chapter engages with liberal multiculturalist arguments to illustrate the advantages of medieval approaches to national diversity. In place of self-government rights, the book suggests legal pluralism and policies of recognitions as more fruitful arrangements for multinational polities. Moreover, the chapter applies the insights of the study to the European Union and the United States, respectively. It concludes by responding to a number of liberal nationalist concerns, especially the need for pre-political partnership to undergird democratic politics.

Chapter 2 provides a theoretical framework for the book. I articulate, first, why it is useful to think in terms of social imaginaries, rather than alternative sociological concepts (such as paradigms or ideologies), for analysing social integration in modern societies. I then explore why, in modernity, it was imaginaries of prosperity that provided the most stable foundations for social integration. These imaginaries can bridge, I argue, the plurality of worldviews and identities, while at the same time play into modernity’s strengths, namely democracy and knowledge governance. However, any particular imaginary of prosperity can provide only a temporary foundation, because it will sooner or later produce too many problems and contradictions to continue fulfilling its integrative role. When such problems mount, imaginaries of prosperity become subject to their own dialectics, having to shift eventually between privatised and collective routes to prosperity. If, however, the pressures for change cannot be institutionalised through democratic channels, we have seen in the past – and are seeing again today – that illiberal and undemocratic tribal imaginaries may take hold, making identity (rather than prosperity) the main vector of politics.

Chapter 8 summarizes the book as a whole and discusses theoretical implications. I briefly review the argument and the evidence provided to substantiate its claims. I then assess the implications of these findings for the comparative study of ethnoracial and identity politics and the interdisciplinary study of race in Brazil and Latin America. For comparative political scientists studying ethnic and identity politics, I emphasize how my argument highlights an alternative role for the state in these processes: as a set of actors responsible for shaping citizenship rights and subjective experiences, which in turn shape the subjectivities and identities that citizens bring into the political arena. For interdisciplinary scholars interested in Brazil and Latin America, I emphasize the dynamic nature of the state of racial politics in Brazil, and suggest that future studies move beyond the well-trod characterization of the Brazilian case as the go-to example of the absence of racial politics. I conclude the book with discussion of the challenges ahead for Brazil's racialized democracy.

This chapter marks out an arc of poetic productions in originary languages, starting in the colonial period with materials compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and following with productions in Nahuatl penned by Sor Juana. The chapter moves into the nineteenth century with the interventions of Faustino Chimalpopoca, and the attempts to “update” Nahua poetry by José Joaquín Pesado. A critical assessment of the role played by scholars such as Ángel María Garibay and his student Miguel León Portilla during the twentieth century leads into readings of contemporary poets who write in Indigenous languages. Women poets of this genre, such as Natalia Toledo and Irma Pineda, are of particular interest.

Once again, teachers are being made into political pawns, where K-12 schools are sites of various culture wars. This chapter frames the contemporary politics of teaching as grappling with the pluralism represented in demographically diverse classrooms. Through historicizing this quest in Gunnar Myrdal’s analysis of the “American dilemma” and unifying creed as panacea, it is possible to identify the enduring social, public, and psychodynamic dimensions of an inclusive ideal. Teachers should be prepared to cultivate deep commitment to republican virtues, in principle, while destigmatizing the identity and ontology of the “other.” A credal deep pluralism can ground classroom praxis for the relational and ethical tensions that forms of difference engender in a democracy.

Western imperialism and interests have long shaped the contours of regional politics in Oceania. This study does not attempt to understate these influences, let alone provide an apology for them. But neither does it overstate them, for to do so would be to cast other actors into subsidiary roles. It seeks to illuminate perspectives on all the forces at play throughout the region, especially with respect to the multifaceted politics of identity. It shows not just how complex the issues are but also how difficult it is to reduce these to any one conceptual framework. Accordingly, this study does not attempt to apply any single interpretive model but rather draws insights from many different perspectives to build a more comprehensive overview of Oceania as a region in which cooperation and competition, tensions and contradictions, and challenges and opportunities are all at play at any given time.

This section extends the insights generated by exploring the Shakespeare Tercentenary to the cultural and political debates of our own time. Since the crises of 1916 lay the foundations of the modern world order, many issues with which we struggle – anxieties about belonging, immigration, globalisation, and ethnic diversity – echo the problems that came to the fore then. The 2016 Quatercentenary commemorations demonstrated that Shakespeare continues to be evoked as a guarantor of common values on which diverse, often competing groups build their collective identities. He is still attractive both to those who believe that he is global and universal and those who view him from a more exclusive, nationalistic perspective. While homogenising ideas of imperial and national identities often dominate the debate, Shakespeare also provides an outlet for the silenced and ignored voices of marginalised social, racial, and ethnic communities. This book brings these voices out of oblivion. It also offers a window into the processes whereby our very identities are formed, debated, and reformulated. Revisiting the 1916 versions of Shakespeare – multiple, conflicting, entangled in debates surrounding belonging and otherness – can help us understand our own identity politics and culture wars.

Within the framework of the politicization of the personal, this chapter explores the essayistic writing of a loose group of socially conscious actors who belong to the political Left, a capacious category that includes leaders of the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the New York Intellectuals, the New Left, the environmental movement, and groups with a range of progressive agendas. With a focus on the twentieth century, the wide variety of styles and themes of leftist prose writing is analyzed. The chapter dwells on the contributions of important figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Randolph Bourne, Jane Addams, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, N. Scott Momaday, Maxine Hong Kingston, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and Richard Rorty. As a form of "prose that thinks," the essay has been an excellent site of intellectual reckoning where writers may publicly take strong positions on various political and social issues, expressing these in a highly personal style.

Chapter 13 analyses how profound socio-demographic changes in America have contributed to a shift from the faith-driven culture wars of the twentieth century to a more secular identity politics between liberal cosmopolitans and populist communitarians in the twenty-first century. This trend appears closely linked to the rapid decline of American Christianity, which along with globalisation, individualisation and rapid ethnic change has led to an identity crisis in parts of the white working class. Given the relative unresponsiveness of the traditional party system to this development, Donald Trump succeeded in capitalising on this crisis of identity through a ‘hostile takeover’ of the GOP by the alt-right, and a gradual ‘Europeanisation’ of the American right, which shifted from a faith-based social conservativism to a more identitarian and populist white identity politics.