This chapter considers the ambiguous utopian impulses of literary, filmic, and television works published and produced in the 1970s. Drawing on the concept of post-imperial melancholy, the chapter traces the utopian contours of these texts’ forceful, often shocking, critique of British imperial nostalgia. It focuses on sub-genres that emerged during this significant decade, including the British alternate history, the dystopia, and reworkings of the classical literary utopia, with reference to writers such as Daphne Du Maurier, Len Deighton, Anthony Burgess, Emma Tennant, Angela Carter, and J. G. Ballard. These three genres, the chapter argues, critically interrogate the utopian impulse in the 1970s and its possible instantiations in national and transnational imagined communities, as well as the built environment in which the modernity of these communities is expressed. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, identifying how this iconic 1970s punk film reframes the classical narrative structure of literary utopias.

Argentina has a tradition of disavowed racism, with dominant narratives of the nation as racially homogenous due to mass European migration and the supposed disappearance of Indigenous, Black and mixed-race peoples. We argue that the arts have enabled critiques of the subtle ways that race is written into national identity. We analyse race and cultural production in Argentina from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first, when critiques emerged of discourses of nationality articulated mainly around Europeanness. There are explicitly anti-racist expressions by Afro-descendant and Indigenous creators, but, because of Argentina’s specific racial formation, we focus on cultural products by working-class artists (mostly mixed-race people subject to an elusive yet systematic racism) and their white middle-class allies, who together have fostered strategies that, despite not being explicitly anti-racist, have contributed to addressing structural racism. These multiple forms of artistic expression illustrate the shifting valences of race in Argentina in which racial diversity at times goes from invisibility to a hypervisibility that mobilises, among the white middle and upper classes, paranoid fears about the Other that justify repression, but which also allow affective alliances in the face of racism.

The seventh chapter of Invisible Fatherland examines the transformation of August 11 into “Constitution Day.” Introduced in 1921 in the form of a modest celebration, this annual commemoration of President Ebert’s signing of the Weimar Constitution became a key moment of republican self-representation. The chapter traces the expansion of the festivities during the years of relative stability in the mid-1920s and their culmination on the occasion of the constitution’s tenth anniversary in 1929. Despite its growing prominence, the holiday faced strong opposition from representatives of the far-left and far-right, who rejected the republic’s legitimacy. The chapter explores how this obstruction shaped the government’s efforts to establish an inclusive and forward-looking democratic tradition. In tying together different strands of this book, this chapter demonstrates that the republic pioneered an early form of constitutional patriotism, even before the concept was formally articulated.

Preparing the ground for a broadly contextualize study of Weimar constitutional patriotism, the first chapter of Invisible Fatherland examines the symbolic forms and practices of the German Kaiserreich from its foundation in 1871 through World War I to the November Revolution of 1918. The analysis highlights the progressive nationalization of imperial symbols and their ability to resonate beyond social, political, and regional divides. The chapter concludes with a detailed examination of the return of German troops to Berlin at the end of the war. The official welcome parades in the German capital, marked by symbolic openness and ambiguity, reveal the tension between imperial continuity and revolutionary transformation. By focusing on the emerging republic’s shifting symbolic order during this liminal moment between war and peace, the chapter illuminates the persistence of imperial legacies alongside the possibilities for new, democratic forms of political belonging.

This chapter examines literature that emerged from the fraught historical juncture after the Second World War as Britain collectively reimagined itself as a national people. It takes up texts by two prominent groupings of writers who did not feel included within the expanding parameters of Britishness: the era’s youthful up-and-coming English writers Kingsley Amis, John Braine, and John Osborne, sometimes referred to as ‘Angry Young Men’; and the migrant West Indian writers E. R. Braithwaite, Beryl Gilroy, Joyce Gladwell, George Lamming, and Samuel Selvon, who are commonly thought of as belonging to the ‘Windrush generation’. Tracing how both sets of writers negotiated this tense cultural and political space, the chapter illustrates how these texts register structurally similar contradictions between formal and informal belonging along markedly different axes of, respectively, class and race, ultimately suggesting that the era’s literature both reveals restrictive forms of British identity and proposes models of redress.

Historical tensions over race and nation have bubbled over time and resurfaced again since the Brexit vote in the forms of increased racism and a “hostile environment.” British Muslim identity and belonging has been a complex process of negotiation in the British Isles and beyond. This chapter explores how transnational Muslim identities in Britain form digital interconnections and face disruptions in an increasingly securitized global architecture in which the digital serves as a place of contestation and surveillance. Through summary close readings from selected writings by Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid, Ayisha Malik, and Zaffar Kunial, this chapter emphasizes how Muslim writers translate the limits of a national English identity for migrant groups after Brexit through new representations of enclosed spaces such as gardens and parks.

This chapter explores the ways in which folk music and dance were linked to science and politics in the twentieth century. To understand these relationships, the chapter starts with nineteenth-century collections of folksongs, which determine the canon of Bohemian and Moravian folk music until the present day. The traditional forms of folk music recorded by nineteenth-century collectors nearly disappeared in the twentieth century. This decline coincided with the emergence of a prominent folk revival, marked by the proliferation of both amateur and professional folk ensembles in post-1948 communist Czechoslovakia. Throughout the communist era, which lasted until 1989, these endeavors were officially aligned with the Communist Party’s politics and often carried propagandistic undertones. In the late twentieth century, folk music ensembles and practitioners were both influenced by and influencing classical music, as well as, later, rock and jazz, with institutionalized radio broadcasts playing a significant role in this evolution.

Political and industrial changes during High Imperialism produced social anxiety. Journalists sought explanatory symbols to narrate these changes in the form of short news messages and photographs. Publicity politicians fulfilled this symbolic function. Journalists used celebrity politicians as ‘communicative anchors’, to which they attached overlapping identities of nationalism, imperialism, and modernism. These personae even embodied industrial progress and a ‘business-like’ politics – novel and transparent compared to traditional secretive politics. The politician as a strong ‘captain of industry of the nation-state’ appealed to anxious audiences. The communicative anchor moored individuals to their imagined community. Communicative anchors formed recognizable reference points people could relate to; as projections, journalists infused these anchors with changing meanings. Journalists used these anchors as protagonists to simplify and narrate the complexity of a changing world order. Journalists invoked the power of images, and both technologically and figuratively it was easier to visualize a story about eccentric politicians than about abstract parliaments or bureaucracies. Path dependency followed: the more journalists used anchors to narrate politics, the more useful these anchors became for continuing stories. Consuming these narratives, citizens ‘participated’ in political meaning-making. The politician’s communicative anchoring peaked around 1900, amidst a pervasive press but before further diffusion of institutional power.

Chapter 9 interrogates ways in which violin culture meshed with ideologies of nation, whether the political territory of Britain or any of its constituent countries (England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales). The first of four case studies analyzes how journalism sustained an imagined sense of a string-playing community across Britain. The second suggests that during World War I violin culture contributed to the idea of a united Britain through efforts to supply stringed instruments to troops for recreational use and an advertising campaign that encouraged the purchase of British-made violins at home. The third section unpacks overlaps and fusions between violin culture and traditional fiddle playing, before discussing how traditional tunes from the Four Nations were appropriated by violin culture for domestic consumption and pedagogical benefit. The final section foregrounds the repertoire of newly composed classical works for string orchestra that were conceived as expressions of national identities. Arguing that this creativity was a by-product of violin culture’s growing vitality, the chapter demonstrates how suited stringed instruments were for raising consciousness of nation(s). (172)

Finally, Chapter 6, ‘From permissive consensus to persistent critique’, turns to the most recent past of the Convention. It shows how the critique of the eighties became unsustainable by an unforeseen event: the end of the Cold War. This galvanized the earlier hesitant governments into accepting permanent supranational oversight. However, the signatory states’ caution had not suddenly disappeared. The concerns of the 1980s may have been briefly interrupted in the 1990s, but remained a constant factor.

The Convention also became a topic of public debate in the Netherlands from 2010 onwards: in order for that debate to flourish, a fundamental change in the previous, rather self-evident acceptance of human rights as inherently desirable was brokered, as the Court got caught up in wider debates surrounding national identity and migration.

Finally, the chapter sheds light on the persistent challenges the Convention keeps posing to the Kingdom. Caught between Dutch and Caribbean unwillingness, sensitivities and financial limitations, human rights standards occasionally lose out. The Convention has come to serve as a reminder of the shared responsibility of all in addressing those problems, but remains tied to historical grown discrepancies.

Focusing on the same period as the two previous chapters, Chapter 4 examines a multiplicity of collective identities shared by most residents. Municipal citizenship was based on the defence of citizens against non-citizens, most especially the regional nobility. That defence consisted primarily of the ma armada (‘armed band’), which granted to Perpignan’s consuls the right to lead punitive expeditions against those who had injured citizens. Perpignan sought to extend the ma armada as part of an aggressive campaign against the regional nobility, and it maintained the ma armada against all comers, including monarchs. At the same time, Perpignan showed a growing willingness to be Catalonian, modelling its institutions after those of other Catalonian municipalities and accepting Barcelona’s leadership. And the royal state set the stage for its later triumph through the construction of urban fortifications. Garrisoned citadels enabled royal states to project their power against municipalities in ways that had not been possible before, and that rendered townspeople royal subjects first, municipal citizens second.