This chapter is dedicated to Bill Shankly’s sudden retirement, and the letters it inspired, as a window into a history of emotions among Liverpool supporters in the mid-1970s. These hitherto unseen letters, from the Shankly Family Archive, are written manifestations of the club’s increased ability to appeal across lines of class, gender, nationality, and race, particularly via its most beloved figure, the charismatic Scottish socialist, Shankly.

During the 1930s and early 1940s, numerous groups in Uruguay coalesced to oppose fascism. This chapter examines the antifascist efforts organized by ethnic societies, labor unions, women’s groups, Afro-Uruguayans, students, intellectuals, and artists, among others. The emergent antifascist movements in Uruguay served as nodes in the broader transnational struggle for democracy and against totalitarianism. While some Uruguayans traveled to Spain to directly take part in the Spanish Civil War, others sought to marshal support at home to combat the influence of European fascism. The ideological struggles in Europe were also pressing at home, as President Gabriel Terra initiated a dictatorship in the 1930s that revealed his supporters’ fascist leanings. Likewise, an engrained sense of national exceptionalism tied to Uruguay’s decades-long democratic tradition, augmented the need to resist Terra’s dictatorship (1933–38) and later to repudiate any remnants of its legacy.

The introduction provides an overview of the volume’s key theoretical concepts and empirical cases. It emphasizes that there have been a variety of antifascisms in Latin America and the Caribbean that were not merely derivative of European antifascism or the product of European exiles. Rather, there were homegrown Latin American and Caribbean antifascist movements forged in the interplay between local, regional, and transnational processes. By placing Latin American and Caribbean antifascists in relation to the broader historiography on antifascism, the introduction illuminates their specific heterogeneous agendas, strategies, and styles as well as their class, racial, ethnic, and gendered dimensions. Latin American and Caribbean antifascists participated in exchanges from the Global South to the Global North and within the Global South. They resembled and yet differed from other Global South antifascisms regarding race and imperialism. The introduction ends by providing an overview of the chapters by placing them within the book’s theoretical framework.

This chapter explores the newspapers anarchists used to create and disseminate an anarchist Latinidad that was a radical, transnational, anti-capitalist, anticlerical, anti-imperial, and Spanish language-based identity forged initially by US-based migrant anarchists from Spain and Cuba. Using the anarchist press in Florida and New York, anarchists rejected the importance of identifying themselves as “Spanish” or “Cuban” and instead forged a cross-border working-class identity. In creating this identity, anarchists focused on their encounters with US capitalism and republican democracy from 1886 to 1898. Such encounters conditioned their perspectives on what an independent Cuba could look like and what it should avoid. Anarchists also debated whether or not to support the Cuban War for Independence. Was it just another nationalist project that would usher in a new, exploitative ruling elite, or could an independent, non-nationalist anarchist society be constructed? These latter debates began in mid-1891– three and a half years before the mambises launched their uprising against Spanish colonialism.

I argue that the most efficacious way of establishing a national literature was through the translation of major, high-prestige, foreign texts, such as Greco-Roman epic poetry: translation of Virgil’s poems has had a significant role in creating and honing literary language in European vernaculars and has sometimes served proto-nationalistic and nationalistic agendas. After analysis of the scope of ‘nationalism’ and its relevance to Virgil, I examine examples of the appropriation of cultural authority through translation of the Aeneid in French translations from the sixteenth century, then in other languages including Russian, Hungarian, Portuguese (in both Portugal and Brazil), Catalan, Katharevousa Greek, Maltese and Welsh, with special discussion of the foundational work of Ukrainian literature. I then discuss cases of translation as a proto-nationalist phenomenon, in Hebrew and Argentinian Spanish, and as a transnational phenomenon, in Esperanto. I conclude by relating translation and nation in both outward-looking and inward-looking modalities and in vertical and horizontal dimensions.

A committed student of vernacular literatures alongside classical ones, Shelley matured a deeply integrated vision of European literature as a transnational conversation including the English-language tradition. This conception informs his literary and theoretical writings, his reflections about and practice of translation, and his appropriations and recreations of foreign forms and modes, such as Dante’s terza rima or Petrarch’s Trionfi. His interests focused especially on the Renaissance (in France, Italy, and Spain) and the eighteenth century and Revolutionary period (especially in France) and on figures such as Michel de Montaigne, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, or Madame de Staël and the members of her salon at Coppet. Shelley’s engagements with modern European literatures confirm him as a poet and thinker poised between classical and post-classical cultures, harnessing them to support his revolutionary approaches to versification and poiesis, political and philosophical reflection, and cultural-social activism, against the backdrop of an incessantly evolving modernity.

‘Every year Ireland becomes more and more Americanized’, or so the famed journalist W. T. Stead believed at the turn of the twentieth century. But what did people understand by ‘Americanisation’ and who was doing the Americanising? The term was not uncommon in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, used by a range of political figures, writers and commentators, typically with reference to mass migration. At the time of Stead’s comment nearly two million Irish-born people resided in the United States. Through their communications and return journeys to Ireland, emigrants became the primary image-makers of America in Ireland, making distinctive interventions in the development of political ideas and organisational models in Ireland. This chapter examines perceptions of the impact of the United States, and Irish America, on Irish politics and how different American influences were welcomed, withstood, filtered, and were in competition with each other in the period from the end of the Great Famine to the 1920s. They made significant contributions to different types of political activity in Ireland, but they were always entangled with a range of other transnational influences.

The transnational turn in American literary studies has forged new epistemologies and approaches for thinking about postnational cultural forms while centering empire and imperialism in the development of US culture. This chapter reviews these critical conversations and takes up the recent concept of the Black Pacific to examine how the redefinition of the United States as an empire-state rather than as a nation-state has transformed the study of race and comparative racialization in the long nineteenth century. In so doing, the essay considers some lesser-studied Black American writings on and responses to the Philippine–American War as part of an emerging Black American discourse on the Pacific, as Asia became more geopolitically significant to the United States. The essay pays particular attention to publications from the era’s most influential Black literary magazine, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine. Specifically, it examines the complex Black American reception history of José Rizal’s landmark novel of Filipino nationalism, Noli Me Tangere (1887), which was translated from Spanish into English and published in the United States as two dramatically different abridged novels in 1900.

Several chapters in this volume draw attention to the multiple human rights violations that international migrants face on their journey. This chapter argues that simply calling for a strengthening of migrants’ rights is not enough. If we want to combat the de facto lawlessness of modern migration regimes and the resulting rightlessness of international migrants, we need to enhance not only migrants’ legal rights, but also their political agency and hence develop new political institutions which are accountable to both citizens and migrants. Yet, rather than advocating a global reform, this chapter proposes a model of demoi-cratic migration governance. Migrants’ mobility and membership rights should no longer remain within the absolute discretion of single states or nations but should become the object of reciprocal decision-making between them. Compared with both national and global reforms, demoi-cratic decision-making has a double advantage. It protects the continued existence of bounded political communities which form its central building blocks while at the same time strengthening the voice of international migrants by transforming the citizens of all participating states into potential migrants who, via their national representatives, can codetermine the rights that they will be granted in other member states.

The introduction to Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture offers a survey of recent and historical transnational approaches to Irish cultural production. In doing so, it shies away from insisting on a definitive method for the scholars in the field, choosing rather to highlight the diversity of approaches in the chapters in the volume. The introduction calls for a “weak theory” of the transnational, recognizing the myriad ways that both cultural producers and critics understand the term and the project. It also calls for a critical evaluation of the methods and scope of studying Ireland in a transnational phase, one that does not simply accept that a globalized world must necessarily be read in a globalizing frame.

This chapter draws from the theoretical perspectives of transnationalism, postcolonialism, and critical place-based pedagogy. We use selected constructs from these theories to analyse and address concerns identified in our qualitative studies related to early childhood education and care (ECEC) pedagogies that support migrant families’ transnational identities and practices in the particular context of Aotearoa New Zealand (Aotearoa). Aotearoa is a country with a history of colonisation by Britain, and it continues to address the impacts of colonisation on Māori, the Indigenous people. Postcolonial theorising seeks to understand and theorise restorative pathways beyond these impacts.