Images Dreamed from the Inside

Conventional gentrification literature has meaningfully demonstrated how economic inequality is perpetuated in urban settings, but there has been a limited understanding of how racial inequality is maintained. Drawing from participant observation, interviews, and digital ethnography in the barrio of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles that were collected over five years, this study examines how gentrification functions as a racial project and supports new forms of racialization to maintain uneven development along racial lines. Examining the ways that racial formation processes unfurl at the local scale expands conventional understanding of racial formation theory and practice while, simultaneously, illustrating the centrality of place in race-making. This study finds new race and class formations are developed by casting the barrio itself and significant portions of the Mexican American population as “honorary white.” Despite colorblind and post-racial ideologies espoused in majority-minority cities like Los Angeles, this landscape fostered emerging racial formations alongside gentrification processes which have increased racial, political, and economic inequality.

Workplace training offers a distinctly explicit and uniquely articulate site for the ethnography of the capital–labor relation as an ideological phenomenon, where the everyday work of hegemony is shown to be deeply grounded in the everyday hegemony of work. In this ethnographic account of a factory classroom devoted to introducing production workers to the precepts of Total Quality Management and training them in Statistical Process Control, the neoliberal reform of the labor process—which sought to accomplish a class decomposition of the company’s workforce in favor of an individualizing regime of workers’ personal responsibility and accountability for various quality control operations—repeatedly provoked the company’s Latino workers into angry and vociferous expressions of antagonism to management. Indeed, insofar as the management’s efforts to reform labor by decomposing the workforce as a class formation merely intensified the prevailing preconditions of their racial formation, they thereby only exacerbated anew the Latino workers’ antagonism as workers to the terms of their subordination. Thus, the generic (ostensibly race-neutral) reform of the labor process initiated under the aegis of “Total Quality Management” implicated the presumed management of “quality” in a concomitant reconfiguration of what was, effectively, a contemporary regime of racial management.

This article explores the value of Skeggs’ Formations of Class and Gender for the study of changing social relations amidst rapid socio-economic change in post-liberalisation India. The article is based on insights and reflections from long-term ethnographic research with young lower middle class women in Delhi, employed in the emerging services sector. For these young women, ‘working’ is not merely an activity, it is an identity. And employment is not merely a source of income, it is a site for renegotiation of social relations. As they traverse between home, work and leisure, their new subjectivities come under contestation. In conversations, young women readily talk about gender and class, but are relatively silent about caste, even though it plays out in subtle ways in the workplace and more generally in their everyday lives. This context throws up a set of new questions in relation to Formations – can we understand the entanglements of gender, class and caste in the same way that Skeggs proposes the inextricability of gender and class? What, if any, are the differences between respectability, honour and prestige? Does a Bourdieusian framework open up or limit the avenues of analysis for this context? Engaging with these questions, this article demonstrates the wide-ranging appeal of Skeggs’ astute thinking in Formations of Class and Gender and brings it into dialogue with Global South feminist scholarship.

Some reflections on history, the social sciences, and politics Acknowledgments Part I. The Inequalities of Core and Periphery: 1. The rise and future demise of the world capitalist system: concepts for comparative analysis 2. Three paths of national development in sixteenth-century Europe 3. The present state of the debate on world inequality 4. Dependence in an interdependent world: the limited possibilities of transformation within the capitalist world-economy 5. Semiperipheral countries and the contemporary world crisis 6. The rural economy in modern world society 7. Modernization: requiescat in pace 8. From feudalism to capitalism: transition or transitions? 9. A world-system perspective on the social sciences Part II. The Inequalities of Class, Race and Ethnicity: 10. Social conflict in post-independence Black Africa: the concepts of race and status group reconsidered 11. The two modes of ethnic consciousness: Soviet Central Asia in transition 12. Class and class conflict in contemporary Africa 13. American slavery and the capitalist world-economy 14. Class formation in the capitalist world-economy Part III. Political Strategies: 15. Old problems and new syntheses: the relation of revolutionary ideas and practices 16. Fanon and the revolutionary class 17. An historical perspective on the emergence of the new international order: economic, political, cultural aspects Concluding essay 18. Class conflict in the capitalist world-economy Index.

This article introduces the present Special Theme on the global reception and appropriation of E.P. Thompson’sThe Making of the English Working Class(1963). It aims to interrogate Thompson’s legacy and potential vitality at a moment of renewed social and intellectual upheavals. It emphasizes the need for an interdisciplinary and global reflection on Thompson’s work and impact for understanding how class, nation, and “the people” as subjects of historical inquiry have been repeatedly recast since the 1960s. Examining the course of Thompson’s ideas in Japan and West Germany, South Africa and Argentina, as well as Czechoslovakia and Poland, each of the following five articles in the Special Theme is situated in specific and different locations in the global historiographical matrix. Read as a whole, they show how national historiographies have been products of local processes of state and class formation on the one hand, and transnational transfers of intellectual and historiographical ideas, on the other. They highlight the remarkable ability of Thompsonian social history to inspire new lives in varying national contexts shaped by different formations of race, class, and state.

Racialized class formation is a process in which both racial formation and class formation shape the experiences of African Americans in the stratification system. This occurs for blacks in differing social classes. However, this chapter focuses on African Americans in the professional middle class. The professional middle class as a whole has grown substantially under postindustrialism. Racialized class formation has been greatly shaped by the nature of state policy regarding citizenship rights and has varied in the transition from the pre-civil rights era to the post-civil rights era. This chapter utilizes historical, interview, and secondary data to analyze experiences of the “first generation” of black professionals to integrate employment in mainstream institutions after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The focus is on the processes of recruitment, hiring, and promotion, as well as relations with clientele among those black professionals and how their middle class employment experiences are racialized.

Reviewed by: The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves of Cuba May Fu The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves of Cuba. By Lisa Yun. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008) The Coolie Speaks is a remarkable interdisciplinary text that explores the historical, literary, and philosophical implications of Chinese indentured labor in nineteenth-century Cuba. Lisa Yun offers an exceptional analysis of the 1876 Cuba Commission Report, a compilation of hundreds of coolie testimonies gathered during an investigation into their mistreatment and exploitation at the hands of Cuban sugar planters. She argues that the testimonies, depositions, and petitions associated with the Commission Report evidence the articulation of coolie subjectivity as well as the emergence of a distinct literary and historical form she terms the coolie narrative. In doing so, she extends those arguments which simplistically cast Chinese indentured workers as racial anomalies located in between Cuba’s Black-white racial binary or as laborers who mediated the transition from a slave to free economy in Cuba. The written and oral testimonies of Chinese workers – as acts of resistance, critique, and narrative – form the basis of the book’s analysis. Yun analyzes the detailed and often tragic accounts of coolie indentured laborers who worked in tension with African slaves and under oppressive conditions on Cuban plantations. She identifies not only how workers challenged, rebelled, and conspired against planter authority, but also how the act of testifying enabled them to articulate their historical voice, record family affiliations, construct collective memory, and communicate across linguistic, national, social, and class divisions. Her close examination of coolies’ responses reveals the fascinating ethnic and class heterogeneity of the workers themselves, disrupting modernist assumptions of a universal, homogenized coolie subject. Attuned to the multiple conditions that structured the state-sanctioned Commission interviews, Yun unravels the political, economic, and social contexts through which the testimonies were secured, transcribed, and produced. By laying bare the politics and ideologies that delimited the interviews, Yun offers a generative analysis of coolie subjectivity as both critical and symptomatic of the racial, social, and economic contradictions of modern liberalism. With primary sources that include testimonies, political tracts, travelers’ accounts, legislation, and historical writings, Yun reveals how Chinese indentured workers embodied the contradiction between the promise of free contract labor and the brutal reality of everyday life on sugar plantations. Centering the experiences of Chinese laborers in her analysis, she investigates the modern contract as a mechanism that actively enabled conditions of slavery rather than disabling it. Her careful reading of coolie testimonies makes apparent “the disingenuous representation of freedom as contract and the actual practice of slavery via the contract” (139). Widely considered a legal instrument of free agency and agreement, the modern contract functioned as a disciplining mechanism for Chinese workers whose hopes and bodies were ensnared in the promises of an always deferred liberation. One of the book’s most important contributions is its identification of a coolie narrative. Like the African slave autobiography and narrative, the coolie narrative has “the quality of being transpirational – to make known what was suppressed or secret, to exhale, to leak out what had transpired” (56). It is also characterized by “featured verse, literary allusions, historical references, cultural metaphors, and repeated tropes of witnessing, veracity, and resistance” that together expose the colonial economies, racial formations, and modernist contradictions that marked colonial Cuba (56). As such, the coolie narrative provides a generative historical and literary tool for cultural and social analysis. Yun closes her detailed reading of coolie narratives with an unprecedented exploration of the life and writings of Antonio Chuffat Latour. Chuffat was a second-generation Afro-Chinese author who wrote Apunte histórico de los chinos en Cuba, a social history of the Chinese in Cuba during the dynamic period of abolition and independence. Yun credits Chuffat’s 1927 book as the earliest text to frame the Chinese experience in Cuba as a subaltern history intimately linked to the history of African slavery on the island. It also anticipated the work of subsequent scholars with its impressive portrayal of Chinese ethnic organizations, class formation, transnational politics, cultural groups, and diaspora. Like her treatment of the coolie narrative, Yun understands Chuffat’s...

In a context of rising inequality and economic vulnerability in the United States, we explore links between class identities, urban place-making, and poverty politics. We ask how class difference and poverty politics are made and remade in neighborhood-level place-making and with what implications for boundaries and alliances between middle-class and poorer residents. Place-making refers to activities through which residents work to produce the neighborhood they want, such as participating in community organization or initiatives, interacting with their neighbors, and supporting or opposing particular changes in the neighborhood. We use a relational poverty framework to show that middle-class place-making reproduces normatively white middle-class place imaginaries but always also produces poverty and class politics. We extend prior research on middle-class poverty politics, which focuses primarily on class boundary making, to investigate whether progressive, alliance-building moments ever emerge. Drawing on case study research with two Seattle neighborhoods, we trace the ways in which place-making practices situate middle-class and poorer actors in relation to one another. We show that these interactions might continue to govern poverty and poorer people but might also challenge normative understandings of poverty and sow the seeds for cross-class alliances. Through comparative analysis of the neighborhoods as dense sites of class formation, we show how particular histories, place imaginaries, and built or institutional infrastructures allow (or foreclose) questioning and reworking of normative class and race formations and poverty politics to pave the way for cross-class alliance.

In this article I consider “style” as a linguistic and cultural concept that can demonstrate how identities performed through language use are linked to topics of central concern in studies of immigrant youth, including racial and ethnic formation, generational cohorts, acculturation, assimilation, and gender. I draw on anthropological and sociolinguistic approaches to style not generally considered in migration studies and present ethnographic data of two cliques of Desi (South Asian American) teens in a Northern California high school. I argue that analyses of youth style can substantially complicate assimilation frameworks by highlighting the ways in which young peoples' linguistic practices may not fit neatly into commonly used analytical categories of “immigrant” and “American.” Focusing on how political economy and local histories inform power and difference that shape migration experiences for youth, the article moves beyond routinely examined areas of heritage language retention and loss to analyze the significance of youth performances of heritage languages as well as English.

Dangerous Speech: A Social History of Blasphemy in Colonial Mexico

Dreamfields describes how its disciplinarian structures liberate and transform its cohort of ‘urban children’. These children are assumed to come from unstructured, unhappy homes, where working class parenting, not ethnicity, is described as the problem. However this ‘urban child’ is inherently racialised due to the majority of students coming from ethnic minority backgrounds. The chapter shows how race and class were mutually created through historical representations rooted in the development of industrial capitalism, classificatory mechanisms and empire before showing how these historical trajectories are evident within Dreamfields’ current approach. Theoretically, the chapter discusses how processes of subjectification work to cultivate docile bodies so that ‘appropriate’ capitals can be grafted on.

Since the 2011 emergence of the San Francisco Bay Area “Tech Boom 2.0,” anti-eviction activists of the region have been caught amidst a maelstrom of media wars involving an amalgam of real estate and technology speculative analyses. As tensions grow, the media itself becomes increasingly polarized, as some journals and journalists side with simplified renditions of tech being good or bad, of development being right or wrong, of housing justice activists being outmoded or salvific. This article attends to this media polarization, studying likely and unlikely alliances between journalists, media sources, and advocates of various urban futurities. At the same time, it looks to alternative media arts and hybrid technologies that have arisen precisely to theorize contemporary realities of the region, from critical cartography digital projects to projection art productions. In doing so, I ask, how have innovative media arts projects such as that of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, People Power Media, and the Saito Group arisen out of both a media dearth and surplus, not only furthering community knowledge production but also shattering dialectical narratives clung to by other media sources? Furthermore, I question, how are entanglements and polarizations across varying media production constituted by, and constitutive of, formations of class, race, and gender? Drawing on cultural and media analysis, feminist technology studies, and critical race and ethnicity studies, this paper situates the technological media crisis and eruption of the Bay Area present alongside the spatial materialization of technological growth, looking at how technologically driven geographic mutation both mediates and is mediated by emergent media technologies.

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I try to clarify the notions of racialisation and racial formation and how they operate in the framework of nation states like Brazil. My main argument is that these processes are always constrained by the formation of social classes and national cultural repertoires even if transnational forces are important in nurturing them. I conclude by making a preliminary effort to unravel mechanisms and institutions which allow these processes of racialisation and racial formation to form part of the daily lives of black Brazilians in the context of class-structured urban spaces.

Feminist media studies of postsocialism are well practised at explaining how ideologies of gender and nation reinforce each other amid neoliberal capitalism on Europe’s semi-periphery. They extend this, by critiquing media marginalization of Roma, into addressing regional formations of race. Yet they rarely go on to contextualize the region’s place within “race” as a global structure of feeling, or how transnational processes of “race in translation” operate in postsocialism—as necessary as this would be to fulfil ever-more-frequent calls to combine postsocialist and post-colonial analytical lenses. Vestiges of racial exceptionalism thus still often characterize postsocialist studies despite Anikó Imre’s intervention against them more than a decade ago. This paper traces how south-east European pop-folk music’s politics of representation, “modernity” and “Balkanness” interact with aesthetics of ethnic/racial ambiguity in Western female celebrity to translate globalized, racialized tropes of exoticism into postsocialist national media cultures. By explaining how pop-folk female celebrity translates the transnational racialized aesthetics of so-called “ethnic simultaneity” into postsocialist glamour, the paper puts Imre’s intervention against racial exceptionalism into practice, expanding postsocialist feminist media studies’ conceptual tools for understanding the regional politics of ethnicity into engagement with the global politics of race.

Contemporary debate about immigrants provides an opportunity to expand the conversation about race and class. Immigrants in the US complicate racial categories and class formation, putting them in flux, while simultaneously opening possibilities to address historical and contemporary racial and social inequalities. Migrants affect class relations within and across borders, contributing to the conversation and activity around global justice. The convergence of the immigrant rights struggle with the global justice movement has furthered strategies that do both—confront racism and class oppression.