Group items tagged

"The collections, exhibiting techniques and events offered at France's national museum of immigration history are explored through this critical review of Cité Nationale de l'Histoire de l'Immigration (CNHI) at the Palais de la Porte Dorée in Paris. The case study considers the extent to which one of the capital's newest museums has successfully and sensitively aligned the colonialist architecture of its building - originally constructed for the 1931 World's Fair - with twenty-first century, postcolonial perspectives on the decolonisation of cultural spaces, and pluralisation of curatorial narratives, to better reflect the histories and lived experiences of diverse audiences."

Fitna is a 2008 short film made by a Dutch member of parliament to support his fight against Islam. It shows shocking footage of terrorism, violence and women's oppression and claims that these are inherent to Islam. The film caused immense controversy and mobilized people across the world to produce and upload their own views to YouTube. In this article we analyze these videos using different theoretical models of democratic interaction, and distinguishing between antagonism, 'agonism' and dialogue. On the basis of a cybermetric network analysis we find that the videos are mostly isolated reactions to the film. Only 13 percent or fewer of the posters interacted with each other through comments, subscriptions or 'friendship'. These interactions could be qualified as antagonistic or agonistic, but very rarely involved dialogue. We therefore conclude that YouTube enabled a multiplication of views rather than an exchange or dialogue between them.

"Frantz Fanon offers a lucid account of his entrance into the white world where the weightiness of the 'white gaze' nearly crushed him. In chapter five of Black Skins, White Masks, he develops his historico-racial and epidermal racial schemata as correctives to Merleau-Ponty's overly inclusive corporeal schema. Experientially aware of the reality of socially constructed (racialized) subjectivities, Fanon uses his schemata to explain the creation, maintenance, and eventual rigidification of white-scripted 'blackness'. Through a re-telling of his own experiences of racism, Fanon is able to show how a black person in a racialized context eventually internalizes the 'white gaze'. In this essay I bring Fanon's insights into conversation with Foucault's discussion of panoptic surveillance. Although the internalization of the white narrative creates a situation in which external constraints are no longer needed, Fanon highlights both the historical contingency of 'blackness' and the ways in which the oppressed can re-narrate their subjectivities. Lastly, I discuss Fanon's historically attuned 'new humanism', once again engaging Fanon and Foucault as dialogue partners."

"In an effort to understand how supremacists may respond to future socio-political events, this article examines how White Aryan Resistance (WAR), as a major player in the White Supremacist Movement (WSM), conceptualises nationalism and who qualifies as a 'real' American. I use discourse analysis on two year's worth of WAR newsletters: twelve monthly issues before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and twelve issues after this date. Only partial support is found for outcomes that the existing nationalism literature would predict, suggesting that those who research the right-wing must better understand the WSM's sense of status loss to adequately predict future violent action from these groups. I show that WAR did not increasingly target Arabs after the attacks, which may have enhanced their membership and mobilisation efforts, but that this decision was a rational response in the context of status threats and limited movement resources."

"Documents and maps describe settlement locations and objects possessed by the Carib, or Kalinago, in the Commonwealth of Dominica during the post-Columbian period. Archaeological testing at multiple sites in northern Dominica reveals that historical Carib settlements functioned as trading sites, observation posts, or refuges, but such testing has not recovered material culture described in the documents. Part of the explanation for the lack of correspondence between ethnohistory and archaeology is the inadequacy of the Carib ethnonym, which has been manipulated by the political and economic interests of European colonizers since 1492. Beginning with the first voyages of Columbus, the Carib were portrayed as warlike cannibals who raided the "peaceful" natives of the Greater Antilles. Carib-French contacts in the seventeenth century recorded origin myths and linguistic evidence that fit with the initial Spanish impressions of native Caribbean peoples. Archaeological findings reveal some of the heterogeneity that has been obscured by the Carib category recorded in the ethnohistoric sources."

"Folk conceptualizations of racism can be defined as ordinary people's understandings of the sources and persistence of racism. They function as equalization strategies - by denying the legitimacy of racism - and guide beliefs regarding antiracism strategies. I explore folk explanations of racism among black professionals in Brazil and South Africa by drawing on sixty interviews with members of these groups. In Brazil, racism is understood as an historical lingering, a product of ignorance, which will disappear with time and education. In South Africa, racism is viewed as more resilient, as a part of human nature and as a consequence of the competition for resources. These explanations of racism are closely related to the antiracism narratives that are salient in these two contexts: while Brazilian respondents affirm their belief in racial mixture and moral education, South African respondents are more uncertain about the possibilities of weaker racial boundaries in their country, relying on institutional constraints as their main antiracism strategy."

"The notion that racial mixture is a central feature of Latin American societies has been interpreted in different, if not strictly opposite, ways. On the one hand, scholars have presented it as evidence of weaker racial boundaries. On the other, it has been denounced as an expression of the illusion of harmonic racial relations. Relying on 160 interviews with black Brazilians, we argue that the valorization of racial mixture is an important response to stigmatization, but one that has multiple dimensions and different consequences for the maintenance of racial boundaries. We map out these different dimensions - namely, 'whitening', 'Brazilian negritude', 'national identification' and 'non-essentialist racialism' - and discuss how these dimensions are combined in different ways by our interviewees according to various circumstances. Exploring these multiple dimensions, we question any simplistic understanding of racial mixture as the blessing or the curse of Latin American racial dynamics."

Jamaica Kincaid's compact and succinct story "Girl," the lead story in the collection At the Bottom of the River (1983), has been lauded as one of the premier works in Kincaid's corpus, particularly her discourse on the making of "woman" in postcolonial Caribbean contexts. The text is essentially a set of instructions offered by an adult (assumed to be a mother), laying out the script for the performance of womanhood in the fictional society in which the female child is expected to live and perform her gender. "Girl"'s emphasis on performative acts reiterates the inextricable link between gender and performance. Undoubtedly, this landmark Kincaid story is in dialogue with Butler's theorization of the centrality of stylized acts in the creating and crafting of gendered selves. Less well known is Oonya Kempadoo's debut novel Buxton Spice (1999). Buxton Spice chronicles the experiences of four pubescent girls in 1970s Guyana as they learn about, participate in, and challenge some gender expectations of their immediate and wider communities. The story is told from the point of view of Lula, who keenly observes the ways in which gender roles are enacted and how these roles may be re-enacted. Her observations alert the reader to the novel's preoccupation with uncovering, or perhaps reconfiguring, how gender roles might be at once imagined and played out in contemporary Caribbean societies. Both texts illustrate how the tensions and contradictions surrounding the constructions of womanhood, and in Buxton Spice, manhood, are engaged through performative acts, some of which ostensibly conform to prescribed gender roles but that actually undermine them.

It is argued that what have usually been called 'slave narratives' sometimes more accurately describe 'freedom narratives', especially when individuals who had regained their freedom wrote or dictated such accounts. Most stories that are associated with slavery often focus on the quest for and achievement of freedom through escape, self-purchase or other means. Moreover, it is argued here that there is a distinction between narratives composed by individuals who had once been free in Africa and those who were born into slavery in the Americas. By focusing on the lives of four individuals, Venture Smith, Gustavus Vassa (Olaudah Equiano), Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, and Muhammad Kaba Saghanughu, this article assesses the importance of regaining lost freedom as a motive in compiling the narratives and life histories of these individuals. Smith, Vassa and Baquaqua left autobiographical accounts of their lives, while Kaba left a significant paper trail that allows a study of his life, moving from freedom in Africa to slavery and then emancipation in Jamaica. Mediated by the 'Middle Passage', these texts demonstrate a consciousness of lost freedom and the importance of re-achieving that status, however contested and understood.

For 30 years the dominant approach to Aboriginal affairs in Australia has been to support cultural recovery and accommodate cultural difference in the expectation that this will enhance Aborigines' and Torres Strait Islanders' equality as citizens.This approach has been driven by a dialectic of progressivist desire to ameliorate the effects of earlier colonialist policy and Aboriginalist discourse that assumes isolable cultures, unitary identities and uni-directional causes of marginalisation. That discursive formation, once counter to dominant colonialist discourse, has now itself become normative, internally repressive, counter-productive and resistant to change. This is the national misadventure with Aboriginalism. This paper argues that this unexpected development is a product of the national governing attempt to gain control through public policy that is inadequate to Aborigines' contemporary lived reality of interculturality, post-ethnicity and political agency. It uses an indicative case study and an analysis of the national misadventure to propose a deliberative intercultural approach to public policy in respect of Aborigines.

Within some significant circles, where hegemonic representations of the idea of 'science' are produced, certain orientations of scientific research are carried out, and science and higher education policies are made and applied, references to the alleged existence of two kinds of knowledge, one of which would have 'universal' validity, and 'the other' (in fact the several others) would not, are frequent and do have crucial effects over our academic work. Although some outstanding authors within the very Western tradition have criticized from varied perspectives such universalist ambitions/assumptions, and although many colleagues have reached convergent conclusions from diverse kinds of practices and experiences, such hegemonic representations of the idea of science are still current. The acknowledgment of this situation calls for a deep debate. This article responds to such a purpose by attempting to integrate into the debate a reflection on the shortcomings of hegemonic academic knowledge to understand social processes profoundly marked by cultural differences, historical conflicts and inequalities, as well as significant perspectives formulated by some outstanding intellectuals who self-identify as indigenous, and the experiences of some indigenous intercultural universities from several Latin American countries.

The current 'winds of change' sweeping through North Africa and the Middle East are reminiscent of earlier transformational moments that changed the very political order. As we write this editorial, monumental changes are taking place within Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya. Indeed, it appears that virtually none of the societies within the region are immune from a new-found 'people power' that demands reformation of the political, economic and social order. The winds of change in the Middle East are long overdue and one must ask the question why they did not sweep though after the collapse of communism in 1989, a time of great political change in many parts of the world including sub-Saharan Africa, that subsequently witnessed the end of apartheid. Why did the 'Third Wave of Democracy' as Samuel Huntington (1991) called it, not sweep the Middle East or North Africa?

Examination of the profiles and trajectories of 15 current or past leaders of the Brazilian Association of Black Researchers points to the emergence in Brazil of a new category of intellectuals who may be called "black organic intellectuals"-academics with the marks of black ancestry (such as dark skin) who have been directly or indirectly influenced by the black social movements and therefore do not resign themselves to racial prejudice and discrimination and racial inequalities. The active academic ethos that guides their professional behavior as university professors leads them to study these inequalities and to promote policies aimed at racial equality and the elimination of racism from Brazilian society.

"Segregated schools are a widely documented component of American history. Conversely, in Canada, provincially legislated segregation of Black Canadians has not been fully acknowledged. This historical amnesia raises numerous questions about the construction of Black experiences in both states. This interview examines Sylvia Hamilton's documentary The Little Black School House (2007), which explores the past as a means to contribute to the ongoing vitality of Black communities. Our discussion places this film within the historical context of legislated segregation in Canada and the United States, drawing attention to histories that have been largely absent within the dominant Canadian historical narrative."

This article draws on the insights/questions that emerged while putting together a set of stories for children published in a series named Different Tales. These stories, set in Dalit and other minority communities, problematize the normative grids through which we view 'childhood' as they depict the complex ways in which children negotiate and cope with the material conditions of their marginality, often drawing upon the resources and relationships within the community. What follows is a resistance to representing culture as a marker of essentialized difference.

Reviewing the 22 years that have elapsed since Gifford's 1989 report labelled Liverpool as racist, the authors focus on the fact that in a city which has had a British African Caribbean (BAC) community for over 400 years, there is minimum representation of that community in the city's workforce. The authors investigate two major forms of employment in the city, i.e. the teaching workforce and the city's Council workforce and one major route to employability, i.e. Higher Education Institutions in the city. They set out an evidenced argument which demonstrates the under-representation of the BAC community in two of the city's major areas of employment. The authors hypothesise that this under-representation is grounded in institutional and structural racism.

"This article considers the relationship between ethnic and racial minority rights and citizenship in Asia. The most ethnically divided and populous region in the world, Asia is home to some of the most contrasting state responses to ethnic minority assertions of diversity and difference. Asia is also awash with wide-ranging claims by geographically-dispersed ethnic minorities to full and equal citizenship. In exploring the relationship between ethnic minority rights claims and citizenship in Asia, this article considers the relevance of certain core assumptions in Western-dominated citizenship theory to Asian experiences. The aim is to look beyond absolutist West-East and civic-ethnic bifurcations to consider more constructive questions about what Asian and Western models might learn from one another in approaching minority citizenship issues."

This essay situates Chief Buffalo Child's Long Lance: The Autobiography of a Blackfoot Indian Chief (1928) within the cultural context of its production, the anti-Black racial climate of the Canadian Prairies in the early part of the twentieth century, in order to analyze the textual repression of its author's Blackness. Although the Autobiography has been discredited as a fraud because, as Donald B. Smith discovered, Long Lance was not in fact Blackfoot as the Autobiography claims, but "mixed blood" from North Carolina, this essay reclaims it as the first novel penned on the Prairies by a Black author, for it tells a true-more metaphorical and allegorical than factual-story about the desire on the part of displaced "new" world Blacks for Indigenous status and belonging. This essay examines the implications of claiming the Autobiography as the first Black prairie novel and explores how reading it as fiction rather than autobiography extends our understandings of "passing," racial identification and transformation.