Group items tagged

"The meanings attached to "race" across the globe are myriad, particularly as anti-Islamic discourse once again links race and religion. Yet scholars lack a common terminology to discuss this phenomenon. This article hopes to expand critical race theory and scholarship across national lines. This critical examination of recent race-related scholarship provides scholars with empirical suggestions to uncover and document the different processes, mechanisms, trajectories and outcomes of potentially racialized practices that essentialize, dehumanize, "other," and oppress minority groups while imbuing privileged groups with power and resources in nations across the globe. Ten empirical indicators will allow international researchers to assess the particular situation of different groups in different nations to determine whether, and the extent to which, they are subject to racialization. Specifically, this paper calls for a unified terminology that can accurately account for and address race when and where it occurs and a global broadening of a critical comparative dialogue of racial practices."

"Challenging Inequalities: Nations, Races and Communities," that is, challenging inequalities among nations, among races, and among communities. As we wrote in the call for papers: "The conference theme can be interpreted in two different ways. Political,

"This article draws on Agamben's concept of homo sacer (bare-life) and his examination of the Muselmänner - the most de-humanised inhabitants of the Nazi concentration camp - to illuminate the ways that the policy and system of immigration detention in Australia signifies a continuation of the biopolitical paradigm that both created and supported the atrocity of Auschwitz. The article argues that the notion of race occupies a paradoxical position in the concept and body of the refugee in Australia today because while racism brings about and justifies the refugee's incarceration in the camp, the biopolitical processes of the camp create a subject within whom race becomes inevitably subsumed within and transcended by the ontology of bare-life. In this scheme, the question of human rights becomes ever more relevant but even less applicable. The article concludes with a critique of Agamben's key ideas as well as my application of them in light of Foucauldian and other interpretations of his work."

"This study advances literature on the role of cultural tastes in racial identity and work on race in Brazil. I ask how racial categories and cultural tastes co-constitute each other in meaningful patterns and how these patterns reveal the racialized meanings of cultural objects. Using correspondence analysis, I identify taste clusters and then compare these patterns across three racial classification schemas in Brazil. Across all schemas, there is a distinction between blackness and whiteness in terms of the cultural tastes that constitute identities. This holds across symbols of national identity, foreign-influenced genres and Brazilian popular culture. The strength of underlying racial meaning offers a second axis of variation - between 'strong' (primordial, fixed, strictly bounded) versus 'soft' (descriptive, ambiguous, porous) racial identities. Some symbols of national identity carry more primordially laden and invariable racial meaning than do others and thus associate with two distinct types of black identity."

"Antiracism research often examines how stigmatized groups transform the meanings associated with their group. A complementary approach analyses the tactics that dominant and subordinate groups use to defend or advance their 'group positions' in situations that threaten the status quo. A case study of the proposed relocation of an Aboriginal child welfare facility to a rural Ontario township sheds light on both processes. Before rejecting the proposal, white residents and municipal councillors used delaying tactics, searched for race-neutral justifications, offered unsolicited advice, created new rules, and censured 'traitors'. The Native agency (and its few white 'allies'), guided by traditional decision-making practices, initially tried to provide 'neutral' information, stay positive, and emphasize common interests. When these tactics failed, they considered others before foregoing the opportunity to appeal to an independent tribunal. Ultimately, this case shows how laissez-faire frames and small-town dynamics can limit the choice and effectiveness of antiracist tactics."

Drawing upon recent literature on what has been called "epistemologies of ignorance" in relation to race, this paper examines an audit of a research project on equality and diversity in a UK university. It argues the audit functioned as a technology of ignorance. This paper suggests that the audit drew upon the cultural associations between white male academic masculinity with notions of quantification, detachment, and disembodied aggression. In this way, ignorance is seen as a form of labor. In particular, this paper suggests that current forms of neoliberal audit in UK universities could be understood in terms of Haraway's notion of scientific gentlemanly modest witnessing. But rather than the scientific gentlemanly masculinity, neoliberal audit legitimates a hyper-rational audit masculinity which casts women and racialized minorities as subjective, interested, and emotional and in so doing performs epistemic violence which maintains whiteness.

"The introductory essay offers a brief overview of current trends in critical globalization studies and international relations scholarship that shed light on three intersections: between imperialism and humanitarianism, between neoliberal globalization and "rescue industry" transnationalism, and between patterns of geopolitical hegemony and trajectories of peacekeeping internationalism. These research agendas have been generative and politically useful, but have tended to neglect the forms of humanitarian and peacekeeping agency emanating from the global south. In order to address this gap, this introduction lays out a new research agenda that combines interdisciplinary methods from global studies, gender and race studies, critical security studies, police and military sociology, Third World diplomatic history, and international relations. This introduction also theoretically situates the other contributions and case studies gathered here, providing a framework of analysis that groups them into three clusters: (I) Globalizing Peacekeeper Identities, (II) Assertive "Regional Internationalisms," and (III) Emergent Alternative Paradigms."

"This paper aims to demonstrate how intersectionality provides an important conceptual tool to analyse practices of cultural production in ethnic minority media. In the context of the digital age, media are increasingly central as systems of representation of identity, culture and community. However, research examining how ethnic minority media become engaged in struggles of power is rare. Few works have paid attention to the ways in which race and gender operate in tandem to produce and maintain the unequal distribution of power in the mediascape of countries of post-colonial immigration. This paper juxtaposes gender studies and ethnic studies in order to analyse the representation of gender in ethnic media, with a particular focus on journalistic practices."

"The discrediting of the category of race in post-war European societies did not abolish racism: officially endorsed cultural relativism perpetuated Eurocentricism while dismissing racism as the pathology of the individual. Critique of culturalism is, however, to be distinguished from the new wave of anti-multiculturalism, argues Alana Lentin. Ostensibly aimed at the illiberalism of multiculturalism's "beneficiaries", the latter expresses intolerance of "bad diversity"."

Diversity has become a key factor of societal transformation during the last couple of decades. It has challenged the notion of the nation and its traditional representation as one community of people sharing the same 'national values' (eg. Goldberg, 2002). Diversity raises the question how we can, as people with all our mutual differences of, amongst others, sexuality, race and religion, form a community that enables its members to develop themselves, to flourish and prosper. Migration, especially, has had a considerable bearing on the idea of pluralism and its implication for social and political processes of inclusion or exclusion in contemporary societies. Migration has entailed an increasing awareness of diversity within each nation and national community (Heerma van Voss & van der Linden, 2002; Horton, 1995). This special issue of National Identities assembles articles from different disciplines that try to understand what it means for people, around the world, to be citizens in rapidly changing national, social and political landscapes.

Inequality is far from being an unequivocal expression. Although one may say that the various meanings of the concept were somehow always present because of the link between equality and justice, modernity and its natural rights doctrine expanded its reach. Inequality became ultimately related to the material level of an unequal distribution of goods. Nowadays, this is not to be taken for granted anymore. The word "inequality" may be found applied not only to political or moral issues, but also to culture, gender, environment, education, race, or social esteem, to mention but a few. The sort of unifying substratum once given by the material background of the concept is now largely considered to be just one among many other components of inequality, so that when referred to, this type of inequality receives the specific label of "economic income inequality."

In this paper, the author draws upon an examination of two apparently opposed cyborg locations and technologies to show how, in specific instances, globalization, technology, economics, culture and diasporas intersect. Such intersections produce very specific, situated contexts for productive labor forces to emerge at the interface of technologies 'old' and 'new'. These situated contexts place the individual in relation to market forces and community production logics through which labor and affect are placed in hierarchies of digital globalization. The author does this by looking at how the 'sari' is produced, marketed and worn in two 'cyborg' contexts. One of the cyborg locations this article explores is online, the other is offline. By juxtaposing these 'old' and 'new' contexts of production and marketing a sari the author hopes to allow for issues to be raised that otherwise would be invisible.

This paper examines the events commemorating the 400th anniversary of the founding of Qubec City in 2008 and, in particular, the ways in which the Qubec 400 was celebrated in Western France. The author argues that the events provide an instance of trans-Atlantic subject formation. Through analyzing a series of public events that took place in the La Rochelle region of France in 2008, the author argues that this extra-national raciality was constituted through two specific modes: practices of territoriality that signify a 'cartography of origins' and tropes of family that affirm the racialized dimensions of Qubcois belonging in France.

Urban centers across Canada are partitioned by racial geographies that circumvent and circumscribe the movements of aboriginal bodies. This article examines how aboriginal youth experience and engage these racisms that organize Canadian social spaces. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken at a drop-in recreational centre in the inner city of Edmonton, Alberta, it documents the different ways in which indigenous youth employ hip-hop as a means to contest their subjection to these immobilizing racisms. First, it shows how these youth employ hip-hop as a technology of self-transformation through which they recreate their selves as meaningful, efficacious political actors capable of disrupting their relegation to criminogenic places. Second, it documents how the practice of a distinctly indigenous hip-hop allows these youth to innovate an aesthetic space disruptive of the historicist racisms that otherwise subject aboriginality to anachronistic spaces. Finally, this article shows that, by performing a hybridized, distinctly indigenous breakdance, these practitioners of hip-hop dramatize the physical and cultural motility of aboriginal bodies.

"This article investigates racial melancholia as a comparative literary device in Claire de Duras's Ourika (1823) and Hugh Clifford's Saleh (1904). Racial melancholia refers to the process whereby racial self-knowledge becomes a site of psychological trauma for colonized subjects. In both novels, the European educations of Ourika, a West African girl, and Saleh, a Malay prince, lead to their development of racial melancholia and their eventual deaths. European education is blamed as the cause of this deadly melancholia. Yet both stories have different moral centres: one uses racial melancholia to argue for a universal humanism, while the other asserts that cultural difference is fixed and unchangeable. This article draws on psychoanalysis, race theory and postcolonial theory to analyse the charged symbols of racial melancholia and European education across the Francophone and Anglophone colonial empires."

This article proposes aging black women's geographies as a critical forum to rethink human-spatial relationships in Brazil. It ethnographically explores aging black women's life narratives recounted while walking through their neighborhood in the city of Belo Horizonte. Their accounts of their lives in the neighborhood speak to racial, gender, and class positioning in Brazil and how these positions manifest in spatial configurations. However, their stories also reimagine the relationship between individuals, communities, and space offer counter-narratives to traditional concepts of geographic hierarchy, domination, and separation, suggested in ideas such as the 'favela'. The analysis shows how aging black women's geographies model possibilities for re-envisioning liberatory practices and environments.

""Home" to more than 150,000 children from the 1870s until 1996, the residential school system was aimed at "killing the Indian in the child" and assimilating First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children into white settler society. It was, in short, a genocidal policy, operated jointly by the federal government of Canada and the Catholic, Anglican, United, and Presbyterian Churches. Children as young as four years old were torn from their families and placed in institutions that were chronically underfunded; mismanaged; inadequately staffed; and rife with disease, malnutrition, poor ventilation, poor heating, neglect, and death. Sexual, emotional, and physical abuse was pervasive, and it was consistent policy to deny children their languages, their cultures, their families, and even their given names. While some children may have had positive experiences, many former students have found themselves caught between two worlds: deprived of their languages and traditions, they were left on their own to handle the trauma of their school experience and to try to readapt to the traditional way of life that they had been conditioned to reject. Life after residential school has been marred for many by alcohol and substance abuse, cycles of violence, suicide, anger, hopelessness, isolation, shame, guilt, and an inability to parent. First Nations leader Phil Fontaine catalysed the struggle for redress in 1990 when he stunned Canada by speaking about his residential-school experience. The second major catalyst was the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) of 1991-1996, which broadly exposed the horrors of residential schools to Canadians and called for a public inquiry. By the early 2000s there was a growing number of lawsuits, most notably the Cloud and Baxter class actions. In 1998, following RCAP, the federal government issued a "statement of regret" for physical and sexual violations and established the Aboriginal Healing

"White anti-racists are an influential social group within settler-colonial societies that often escape critical attention. This article explores one aspect of white anti-racist subjectivities as experienced by those who work in Indigenous health in northern Australia. Although not usually discussed openly between colleagues, frustration, betrayal, and suffering physical discomfort without complaint are common experiences for whites working in remote Indigenous communities. To explain this suffering, I first develop the novel concept of white stigma. I argue that in progressive spaces where there is a concerted attempt to invert colonial power relations-what I call 'progressive spaces'-whiteness and the privilege it represents is something to be avoided, diminished, and counteracted. When white anti-racists are interpellated as white, this is generally experienced as a stigma. Recognizing whiteness as a stigmatized identity that white anti-racists continuously attempt to rehabilitate and make liveable makes the suffering of white anti-racists intelligible. Drawing on ethnographic research with white anti-racists, I show how suffering works to manage white stigma. This exploration of stigma, suffering and love furthers our understanding of white anti-racists' identities, and through this, liberal governance in settler societies."

"This article examines Malcolm X's affirmation at the Oxford Union of the proposition put forward by US Senator Barry Goldwater at the Republican National Convention in 1964: 'Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.' At Oxford, black nationalism, American conservatism and liberal conceptualisations of rights were all on display, as Malcolm X explored new potentialities in American and black political thought. The paper seeks to uncover some of the less explored dimensions of this moment of transition in US and UK racial politics, even as Malcolm extended his arguments into the broader context of decolonisation in Africa and the extension of rights to Africans and other marginalised groups throughout the world. With the 1964 elections in the US and UK serving as background, the author seeks to illuminate the ways in which the rhetoric and theories implicit in the debate represented both atavistic and new arguments for reconciling the impulse for both racial and civic recognition in modern society."

"While the subjugation and abuse of Palestinians living within Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are well documented, what is less well known is how ingrained racism is in Israel, in that it not only extends to Palestinian Christians and Muslims, but also to Jews who come from ethnic minority backgrounds. This article documents how the Falasha, Ethiopian Jews who have been brought into Israel in several mass transfer operations, have found themselves relegated to an underclass. They are not only racially discriminated against in housing, employment, education, the army and even in the practice of their religion, but have also been unwittingly used to bolster illegal settlements."