Introduction Peter Wagner Part I. Reconstructing the history of Atlantic modernity 1. The American divergence, the modern Western world, and the paradigmatisation of history Aurea Mota 2. The limits of recognition: history, otherness and autonomy Angela Lorena Fuster Peirò and Gerard Rosich 3. On being in time: modern African elites and the historical challenge to claims for alternative and multiple modernities Jacob Dlamini 4. The sublime dignity of the dictator: republicanism and the return of dictatorship in political modernity Andreas Kalyvas 5. The Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment: between reform and revolution Alice Soares Guimarães Part II. Comparing trajectories of modernity in the South 6. Inconsistencies between social-democratic discourses and neo-liberal institutional practices in Chile and South Africa: a comparative analysis of the post-authoritarian periods Rommy Morales Olivares 7. HIV/AIDS policies and modernity in Brazil and South Africa: a comparative critical analysis José Katito 8. Land and restitution in comparative perspective: analysing the evidence of right to land for black rural communities in Brazil and South Africa Joyce Gotlib Part III. Claims for justice in the history of modernity and in its present 9. An unsettled past as a political resource Svjetlana Nedimović 10. Injustice at both ends: pre-and-post-apartheid literary approaches to injustice, sentiment and humanism in the work of C. Louis Leipoldt, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and the film ‘Invictus’ Riaan Oppelt 11. The student movement in Chile 2011–2012: rearming the critique of capitalism Beatriz Silva Pinochet 12. Indignation and claims for economic sovereignty in Europe and the Americas: renewing the project of control over production David Casassas, Sérgio Franco, Bru Laín, Edgar Manjarín, Rommy Morales Olivares, Samuel Sadian and Beatriz Silva Pinochet