The Equality Act provides protection against discrimination on the ground of various protected characteristics: sex, race, disability, age, religion and gender. It protects against direct discrimination where there is adverse treatment because of a protected characteristic, and also indirect discrimination where the same rule is applied to all groups but has an unjustified and disproportionate adverse effect on a group. Adverse treatment includes harassment and victimisation. There is in addition a duty of reasonable accommodation for disabled workers. The law also requires equal pay for women for similar work or work that has equal value to that performed by men.

The slavery debates at Cambridge did not end with the emancipation of enslaved people in the Caribbean and India in 1843. In fact, undergraduates, fellows, and professors increasingly turned their attention to enslavement in the United States of America. Cambridge-educated abolitionists, such as Edward Strutt Abdy and Alexander Crummell, sought to mobilise opinion in both America and Britain against the persistent power of the enslaver class in the Southern United States. The outbreak of the American Civil War (1861–1865) inspired growing sympathy amongst educated British elites, including those at Cambridge, towards the Confederate cause, with many comparing American enslavers to landed British gentry in order to build camaraderie between British and American elites. The Confederacy, in turn, sought to lobby university men and mobilise student opinion in their favour to further the cause of Confederate diplomatic recognition in Britain.

The growing professionalisation of the law and the natural sciences owed much to the spread of the empire – and Cambridge intellectuals would benefit more than most from these processes. Natural philosophers travelled across the empire amassing botantical, geological, and antiquarian collections and expanding scientific knowledge, with much of the credit for their findings owed to local enslavers or enslaved Africans. Britons with financial investments in slave-trading organisations also donated to found professorships. In the case of the law, experts in international law and treaty-making, particularly Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, applied their expert knowledge to cases concerning piracy, plantation holdings, and imperial companies. As with missionary organisations, the problem of enslavement continued to be a source of debate in the eighteenth century, as philosophers of natural law and rights considered the ethical justifications for racial enslavement.

Medieval European travel writing reveals the particular ways that race-making and world-making are bound together. This literature combines ethnography and historiography, usually providing details about the culture and history of the peoples encountered by the traveler, as well as descriptions of the geography and landscapes traversed. Travelers consistently blurred the lines between fantasy and reality, but their writings nonetheless became common source material for encyclopedic texts and romance literature, thereby fueling European knowledge production and popular culture. As this literature developed a fantastical perspective about the world and its diverse inhabitants, it forged a crucible for making up people. It was a mode of writing particularly suited for race-making. This chapter examines race in medieval European travel literature that looked beyond the Levant and into Asia in order to demonstrate how histories of contact in the global Middle Ages shaped the development of racial ideologies in the period. It takes the ‘global’ not as an empirical concept, but as, to use Sanjay Krishnan’s argument, ‘a mode of thematization or a way of bringing the world into view’.

This chapter examines the role of Christology in the subfield of political theology. Political theologies examine the structure and logic of worldly power, assessing its relation to religious and theological dimensions of community formation, the cultivation of the citizen (often in contrast to the non-citizen or the enemy), expectations of messianic emergence and progress, and the potential for enacting meaningful political resistance. Christology is a major focus within the field of political theology both because of the historical role played by Christianity in the political development of Europe and Europe’s imperial and colonial footprint and because Christology is deeply invested in these very questions of power. This chapter focuses on key texts from the twentieth century that remain touchstones for the growing discipline of political theology as it exists today.

Judging by rates of criminal recidivism, the very trauma that leads to American incarceration only amplifies inside facilities whose purported mission is to rehabilitate. Using psychiatric, literary, and sociological studies alongside three twentieth-century prison memoirs written by American men of color – Jarvis Jay Masters’s That Bird Has My Wings (2009), Shaka Senghor’s Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison (2013), and Ravi Shankar’s Correctional (2022) – this essay examines the use of bibliotherapy as a means of processing traumatic memory, reconnecting with community, redressing harm, and reclaiming control over one’s story to help stimulate and accelerate the process of healing and recovery. Life writing, and memoir specifically, allows for the transfiguration of generational, localized, and institutional trauma while bearing witness to the inner workings of carceral spaces, which are disproportionately populated by men of color and intentionally kept concealed from public view.

In this chapter, I will use the Great Khan’s dreams of the white knight as the starting point to examine the problematic figurations of idolatry, fetishism, orality and whiteness within late medieval travel writing, especially Mandeville’s Travels and Marco Polo’s Le Devisement dou monde. Seemingly unrelated among themselves or to whiteness, these material and performative manifestations of faith nonetheless intersect in important ways in medieval perceptions and representations of the Tartars. The kind of cultural and textual ‘whitening’ of Genghis Khan’s dreams that Hetoum and the Mandeville-author engage in points to the power of artistic manipulations. Geoffrey of Vinsauf, in his Poetria nova, argues that art ‘plays about almost like a magician, and brings it about that the last becomes first … black white, and vile precious’. Jacqueline de Weever argues that such a belief in art’s capacity to transform black into white (nigra candida) is also a belief in the possibility of erasing alterity through whitening. Whitening, in its attempt to mask anxieties and assimilate differences, ignores the origin of alterity. The act of whitening, in fact, posits a new origin.

Hemingway’s work was well received from the moment he began to publish. Some of the key ways in which his work has been read were established from the beginning, as critics identified the core elements of Hemingway’s emergent style and as they responded to his resonant themes. Later generations of academic critics, however, brought to bear on Hemingway’s stories and novels the shifting frameworks that would emerge, become dominant, and linger residually in the institutions of literary studies. Chief among the frameworks that would enrich the reading of Hemingway’s work in subsequent decades were the attention to matters of gender and sexuality made legible by feminism and queer theory in the 1980s and 1990s and the attention to race as inextricable from the construction and focalization of Hemingway’s narratives in the 1990s and 2000s. Most recently, the rise of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, and critical disability studies has enabled fresh readings of the work, readings that keep it alive in current cultural debates. Throughout these changes, attention to Hemingway’s achievements in narrative form continues to be important, and it is as a crafter of sentences, and of narratives from carefully constructed sentences, that Hemingway continues to influence fiction writers.

This chapter explores the thought of the intellectual and revolutionary activist, Zweledinga Pallo Jordan, in South Africa. It argues that a global intellectual history approach can be usefully incorporated in understanding his key writings, both archival and curated. Jordan’s writings, largely overlooked, personify a vibrant and engaged intellectual project of anticolonialism, drawing from a transnational circulation of ideas. Their style, content, and form vary considerably, incorporating discussion papers, editorials, newspaper columns, published chapters, articles, speeches, and lectures. The chapter therefore recovers the meaning of the central ideas contained in these writings, by examining Jordan’s own biography and the global context of political exile. It focuses on significant themes such as nation, race, class, and democratic constitutionalism as Jordan attempts to articulate the scope of the South African national liberation project in line with his ideological commitment to the African National Congress (ANC).

This chapter argues that Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper saw Michael Field as a poet of Empire and proposes that scholarship on Michael Field has overlooked the conservative, reactionary social and racial politics of their oeuvre. The chapter surveys Michael Field’s often complex and contradictory responses to race, empire, and imperialism, as seen in their dedicatory verses to various national heroes and their play Brutus Ultor (addressed ‘To The People of England’). The chapter then examines their jingoistic attitude towards the Boer War at the turn of the century, and their orientalised depictions of ‘East’ in plays such as Queen Mariamne (1908), that are revealing of their treatment of racial and ethnic differences.

Science and theatre were intertwined from the start of ‘modern drama’ in the works of Georg Buchner and Émile Zola, who ushered modern ideas about science into the theatre and made conscious engagement with science an intrinsic part of a break with the theatrical past. This chapter traces the explicit, conscious interaction between science and the modern stage, from August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen’s works through to those of Bernard Shaw, Leonid Andreyev, Maxim Gorky, Elizabeth Robins, Eugène Brieux, Harley Granville Barker, Karel Čapek, Tawfiq al-Hakim, James Ene Henshaw, Mary Burrill, Susan Glaspell, and Sophie Treadwell; the probing of race science on stage by Harlem Renaissance playwrights; the Federal Theatre Project’s science-inflected productions; and Bertolt Brecht’s changing depiction of science and scientists. In addition, there is another meaning of ‘science in the theatre’ that the chapter draws out: the hidden, often unacknowledged roles played by science and technology in staging.

This chapter studies relations between Schoenberg, Stravinsky and their respective camps, from the early twentieth century through the composers’ later years in California. Beginning with an early moment in which their relations were characterized by curiosity and mutual respect, it sketches the emergence in the 1920s of an opposition between Schoenberg’s expressionism and Stravinsky’s neoclassicism. It then examines how this opposition was reinterpreted and codified (if not ossified) in T. W. Adorno’s influential Philosophy of New Music, and in his subsequent writings on both composers. Adorno described Schoenberg’s music as a seismograph that registers tremors of feeling; this chapter reworks Adorno’s metaphor in order to propose that the Schoenberg–Stravinsky–Adorno triad might register tectonic movements of a much larger modernity. Engaging with recent literature on all three figures, it suggests some ways their work might relate to modern regimes of racial difference.

Doubling as a theorist of literary character, Virginia Woolf was invested in the tribulations of the modern face, which she approached through the twin genres of portraiture and biography. This chapter revolves around Woolf’s staging of the modernist face in her novel Orlando: A Biography (1928). Woolf’s novel traces a change in the history of the physiognomic face in modernity – from Orlando’s memorable face-to-face with Queen Elizabeth in the early modern period to her search for meaning in the faces around her in London in 1928. At the same time, Woolf’s novel functions as a portrait of Vita Sackville-West, introducing a queer woman into the gallery of memorable historical characters, which Woolf visualized in relation to the all-male National Portrait Gallery in London. Through an engagement with Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s recent photographic reflections on Orlando, developed as a response to the racialized opening of the novel, the chapter frames modernist faciality’s mediation by racial difference.

This chapter explores disciplinary offences in professional tennis, namely anything but doping, corruption, fraud or similar offences. These disciplinary offences are typically found in relevant codes adopted by the three key tennis actors. They involve physical violence on and off the courts; audible obscenity, visible obscenity and verbal abuse; indiscipline and how it has actually contributed to the commercialization of the sport in many ways; the case of grunting; coaching infractions; and Wimbledon dress code. The chapter examines the adjudication and enforcement of disciplinary rules and how these have been transformed with modernity, further touching upon issues of race and mental health and their function in the enforcement of disciplinary rules. The case of Osaka is explored in detail, whose refusal to play certain tournaments as a result of her mental health was viewed as a breach of the WTA’s rules.