The problem of color racism in scholarship on modern and contemporary East Central Europe: a mismatch made in heaven?

In June 2020, an earnest debate occurred in Latvian society surrounding controversy around the local ice cream brand called “Blacky” in English. While some pointed out that this was an expression of racism, others defended the right to name things “as they were” and relocated the political context within a nationalist perspective that “lacked” a racial history. This article explores “racial innocence” as a form of racism in Latvia. Racism and racial innocence, universalism, and particularism in interpreting race mobilize different sets of connections, not only revealing diverse understandings of race but also claiming authority and presenting inner logic to assert these positions. Despite the claimed lack of racial encounters and the absence of a history of colonial superiority, Latvians use racism as a part of the nation-building process and as a way of placing the country on the global map. I suggest that racial innocence is the dominant framework of conceiving racism, where the concept of race plays an important part in creating local hierarchies of the Self and Other. In the Latvian context, race is very much about “self” and self-boundedness, which is being challenged in the process of Europeanization and in situations of interpersonal encounters requiring a reconsideration of the ethics of conduct, racial privilege, and the “natural” grounds of Latvian society.

This research attempts to explore the complexity of the interactions between terrorism, politics, and social dynamics in an increasingly interconnected world. In a global context filled with the threat of terrorism, there is an urgent need to understand the varying definitions of terrorism that are shaped by different political and ideological perspectives. The methodological approach used in this study is a qualitative descriptive analysis. This research highlights that terrorism is not only an act of violence but also a social construct influenced by historical, cultural, and power factors. Through an analysis of the politicization of terrorism, this study demonstrates how terrorism is closely related to political leadership, thereby emphasizing that the relationship between politics and terrorism is a mutually influencing cyclical interaction. This study also discusses the challenges faced in countering terrorism related to existing policies and emphasizes the need for a multifaceted approach and a deeper contextual understanding. The conclusion of this analysis emphasizes that a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between terrorism and political dynamics is crucial for formulating adaptive and effective counter-terrorism policies.

Background: Racial inequality in the U.S. is typically described in terms of stark categorical difference, as compared to the more gradational stratification based on skin color often said to prevail in parts of Latin America. However, nationally representative data with both types of measures have not been available to explicitly test this contrast. Objective: We use novel, recently released data from the U.S. and 18 Latin American countries to describe household income inequality across the region by perceived skin color and racial self-identification, and examine which measure better captures racial disparities in each national context. Results: We document color and racial hierarchies across the Americas, revealing some unexpected patterns. White advantage and indigenous disadvantage are fairly consistent features, whereas blacks at times have higher mean incomes than other racial populations. Income inequality can best be understood in some countries using racial categories alone, in others using skin color; in a few countries, including the U.S., a combination of skin color and self-identified race best explains income variation. Conclusions: These results complicate theoretical debates about U.S. racial exceptionalism and methodological debates about how best to measure race. Rather than supporting one measure over another, our cross-national analysis underscores race‟s multidimensionality. The variation in patterns of inequality also defies common comparisons between the U.S. on the one hand and a singular Latin America on the other.

Films are popularly believed to be reflection of reality as well as a representation of the societies in which they were produced. They are excellent windows into their societies of origin and could thus serve as good anthropological or historical documents containing data about socio-political events that have happened in their societies of origin. One of the multiple data one can extract/gather from films is the socio-cultural and political dynamics prevailing in the society in which the films subsist. This paper attempts to illustrate this thesis through a review of relevant Bollywood and Nollywood films. Specifically, the study hinges on a review of relevant selected films to show how Bollywood and Nollywood are a reflection of cultural and political dynamics in India and Nigeria respectively. The paper starts with a brief background which examines the extent to which Nollywood and Bollywood films could be considered a reflection of contemporary Nigeria and India. It proceeds to defining the concept of cultural and political dynamics, with strict respect to the Indian and Nigerian experiences. The paper ends up with an examination of how these cultural and political dynamics are reflected in relevant Bollywood and Nollywood films. It concludes that both Nigerian and Bollywood films reflect social and political dynamics in their societies of origin in the same way.

Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. Robin Bernstein. New York: New York University Press, 2011.In discussions about controversial social and political issues - ranging from public entitlement programs to gay adoption to abortion - the potential impact on frequently comes up. Why are children invoked in such discourse, and what is the historical and cultural significance of this tendency? In Racial Innocence, Robin Bernstein sheds light on these questions by examining how the notion of childhood innocence has shaped - and been shaped by - conceptions of race. Trans-disciplinary in subject and transhistorical in scope, this fascinating book engages an impressive array of evidence, including graphic arts, ephemera, oral history, and material artifacts. Historiographically, it constitutes an important contribution to the scholarship on childhood (by Patricia Crain, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, and others) and the portrayal of race in literary, visual, and theatrical culture (by Daphne Brooks, Jo- Ann Morgan, and Harvey Young, for example). Theoretically and methodologically, Bernstein provides a new paradigm for understanding objects. Although the social significance of things has long been a topic of interest for Americanists working in material culture studies (e.g., David Jaffee, Jules David Prown, and Laurel Ulrich), Bernstein offers a new perspective by exploring not only what artifacts reveal but also what they demand. In other words, she contends that objects are fundamentally performative: they incite - or script - us to use them in highly specific ways.In the first chapter, Bernstein investigates formulations of childhood in American popular culture during the second half of the 1800s. She shows how representations of innocent white children, particularly Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), came to symbolize innocence itself; how insensate black children, especially Topsy (another figure in Stowe's novel), stood in stark contrast to such images; and how activists and cultural producers mobilized these stock characters to deny and affirm the basic humanity of African Americans. Depictions of white children highlighted their vulnerability and goodness, whereas black children were imagined as comically impervious to pain. Bernstein follows this chapter with a development of her theory of scriptive things, arguing that objects generate practices in everyday life by inviting people to perform, in both the theatrical and functional sense. The scripts associated with dolls, such as the half-white/half-black topsy-turvy doll, are of special interest to her. …

The following is a review of the book Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences and Racial Exceptionalism, written by Kim Park Nelson. In the book, the author used ethnography and collected oral histories, and critical race theory and a post-colonial approach were employed as theoretical frameworks. In particular, as not only an insider (an adoptee) but an outsider (a researcher), she maintained a well-balanced view in describing vivid lived experiences of Korean adoptees and diverse sociocultural environments that impacted them. This book would be a great guide for novice qualitative researchers who want to be ethnographers and study minorities in U.S. society.

This essay uses insights from Southern and childhood studies—particularly Robin Bernstein’s performative theories of racial innocence—to analyze Lee’s newly complicated contributions to understanding US racial histories. I argue that where To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), following American literary tradition, offers child-embodied racial innocence as a solution to injustice, Go Set a Watchman (2015) excoriates it as the problem. Deliberately and forcefully violating childlike trust in Atticus Finch’s racial paternalism, Lee in Watchman invites readers into what for many of her contemporaries, and ours, is uncharted territory: confronting racial injustice not as a black body in pain, or in a despised white Other, but as a system of white power embodied in the self. The extent to which childhood racial innocence is allowed to be ruined in each novel, and the manner of the rage this ruination occasions, offer an important lens into the desires, and the perceived needs, of contemporary readers in both 1960 and 2015.

Within the framework of postcolonial studies, this paper undertakes to examine the politics of ethnic subjectivities and identities in Rebecca Stratton’s popular romance The Silken Cage. It lays bare how ‘blackness’, as an identity marker of ethnic difference, carries social and political meanings in British popular romance. This paper challenges the commonly held view of ‘skin colour’ as a mere biological feature without deeming factors and forces that have informed its conception and hence have constructed it in a number of ways. The suggested romance is worthy of study by virtue of its concern with the notion of ‘blackness’ in the colonial context. A postcolonial analysis of The Silken Cage revealed that ‘black’ subjectivity and identity are constructs that have been shaped and reshaped by historical, social, linguistic, discursive, ideological, and political dynamics. The paper also showed that Stratton’s popular narrative is an order of discourse wherein ‘blackness’ is more than a matter of pigmentation; it is a mark/mask, a uniform, a signifier, a fetish with a whole range of significance and implications. Colonialism, racial segregation, and captivity are some racist practices exploited by the writer to inscribe ethnic subjectivities and identities in the cross-cultural encounter. ‘Blackness’, in this sense, is a political, social, and ideological construct.

Reviewed by: Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights Douglas A. Jones Jr. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. By Robin Bernstein. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Cloth $75.00, Paper $24.00. 307 pages. A timely and exemplary contribution to the historiography of racial formation in the United States, Robin Bernstein's Racial Innocence is an intervention of the highest order. The success of this meticulously researched and carefully argued book rests on two interrelated achievements: the development of a groundbreaking [End Page 143] theory and its application toward highly revelatory ends. That theory, which Bernstein first outlined in a 2009 award-winning article in Social Text, is what she calls the "scriptive thing," that is, as "an item of material culture that prompts meaningful bodily behaviors. The set of prompts that a thing issues . . . does not reveal performance, but it does reveal a script for performance. That script is itself a historical artifact. Examination of that artifact can produce new knowledge about the past" (71-72).1 These scripts are determined or implied; yet they are bound by their own historicities and therefore invite a limited range of actions. In order to establish that range, one must know the attitudes, ideologies, and sensibilities concomitant with that thing and its materiality. With this theory as its analytical charge, Racial Innocence centers on two extremely rich, though under-explored sets of scriptive things—namely, Uncle Tom's Cabin and dolls—as means to demonstrate how "childhood figured pivotally in a set of large-scale U.S. racial projects: slavery and abolition, post-Emancipation enfranchisement and disenfranchisement of African Americans, and, by the turn of the twentieth century, antiblack violence, New Negro uplift, and the early civil rights movement" (3-4). Literary and cultural historians have long taken note of the card games, figurines, handkerchiefs, knickknacks, tins, and countless other "Tomitudes" based on Stowe's characters and scenarios. But, as Bernstein argues, they "have been able to say almost nothing . . . about what people actually did with these items" (9). Reading the everyday performances these scriptive things prompted in mid-to-late-nineteenth-century life, Bernstein explicates how Uncle Tom's Cabin was neither a "text" nor "cultural phenomenon," which "implies a unity or coherence among the disparate parts"; instead, it was a "subjectivization," or what Henry James famously described as a "state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness" (13-14). In addition to Stowe's political, racial, and social appeals, Americans flocked to Uncle Tom's Cabin because they embraced Stowe's explicit and implicit calls "to engage bodily, affectively, with her novel" and "the vivid visual description" she offered "as a tool by which to achieve that goal" (101). Bernstein unearths a number of these performances, and explores the ways Americans' experiences with Uncle Tom's Cabin were often extra-textual. For instance, a number of Tomitudes and stage versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin (including George Aiken's 1852 script, which is the most lasting) do not depict moments from Stowe's text but, instead, reproduce scenes from Hammatt Billings's promotional illustrations for the novel. Combining deft close readings with finely wrought theatre history, Bernstein explains how and why these artifacts and "Tom shows ultimately eclipsed Stowe's novel, replacing Stowe's characters with their [material and] theatrical counterparts in the popular imagination" (113). Billings's images and the items that recreated them stressed [End Page 144] the intimacy that Stowe embedded in her text—so much so that they imagined a number of "tender touches," particularly between Eva and Uncle Tom, that were not in the novel. While these touches derived from Stowe's insistence on black humanity and thus the immorality of slavery, Bernstein traces how by the end of the nineteenth century such haptic relations became stripped of their original ideological substance and served proslavery and antiblack ends. This transformation became most evident in renderings of Topsy. With Topsy, Stowe "created . . . an extraordinarily sophisticated and powerful argument for enslaved children's essential innocence and their susceptibility to suffering" (48). But the vast majority of subsequent cultural producers accentuated Topsy's "wicked" ways, making her the...

The problem studied in this research is perception the company about Social and political dynamics in Polewali Mandar regency . This research uses a quantitative descriptive research design to explain qualitative research phenomena. For this reason, the research approach uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods for community perceptions of social and political dynamics in Polewali Mandar Regency . The data collection techniques used were surveys, interviews and observations. The research results show that, based on the research results, it can be concluded that perception the company about the social and political dynamics in Polewali Mandar Regency which includes social conditions, economic conditions, political conditions, security conditions, law enforcement conditions, regional government performance, general problems and special problems are good, this is marked by the greatest number of several evaluation indicators of The various conditions that occur in society are in good percentage . Meanwhile, the lowest value of the indicator is a bad rating. Community perception of social and political dynamics of residents of Polewali Mandar regency seen from the perspective of functionalism theory It is very diverse, there are some people who have positive perceptions and others who have negative perceptions accompanied by factors that influence it , but overall, in the socio-political dynamics that occur, the Polwali community Mandar has a positive response .

We examine a vast, interdisciplinary, and increasingly global literature concerning skin color and colorism, which are related to status throughout the world. The vast majority of research has investigated Western societies, where color and colorism have been closely related to race and racism. In Latin America, the two sets of concepts have particularly overlapped. In the rest of the world, particularly in Asia, color and colorism have also been important but have evolved separately from the relatively new concepts of race and racism. In recent years, however, color consciousness and white supremacy appear to have been increasingly united, globalized, and commodified, as exemplified by the global multibillion-dollar skin-lightening industry. Finally, we document the growing methodological attention to measurements of skin color and social science data that incorporate skin color measures.

Madrasah is an Islamic educational institution, facing significant challenges in the era of global competition. The political dynamics that accompany the development of madrassas require a comprehensive study to understand the complexity of this institutional transformation process. This research aims to analyze the challenges and opportunities faced by madrasas in a global context, as well as explore effective development strategies. This study uses a qualitative approach to examine political dynamics in madrasah development and explore the challenges and opportunities it faces in global competition. The results of the study show that madrasas face the main challenges in quality standardization, curriculum relevance, competence of educators, and strengthening infrastructure. However, the global era also opens up opportunities for madrasas to integrate science with Islamic values, develop soft skills, and carry out international collaboration. Political dynamics in the development of madrassas involve complex negotiations between the demands of modernization and the preservation of Islamic identity. In conclusion, the development of madrassas in the face of global competition requires a holistic approach that considers political, social, and cultural dynamics. The success of madrasah transformation depends on the ability of stakeholders to manage challenges and strategically capitalize on opportunities. Madrasah has the unique potential to become an educational model that combines Islamic values with global competence, but its realization requires a clear vision and close collaboration between various parties.

We discuss the seeming disappearance of skin color from Richard Mosse’s thermographic photography of two Europe-bound migration routes circa 2015, one leading from the Middle East and another from North Africa. In his projects Incoming and Heat Maps, Mosse uses a military camera that detects thermal radiation, including body heat, at vast distances. The camera, Mosse argues, is color-blind, recording human beings “without describing skin color.” For him, the portrayal of human beings as “mere biological trace” foregrounds the mortality of the people depicted, showing them as “vulnerable organisms” and allowing viewers to empathize with them. However, critics argue that, while the camera does not differentiate, European political decision-makers and border-control personnel do: skin color disappears from the images, but it still conditions their possibility of coming into being, their political and colloquial perception and their translation into politics – the political dynamics that these images do not reveal but reproduce. Mosse’s images exemplify that the constant tension between revealing and hiding in photography remains acute in twenty-first century surveillance societies.

Interpersonal communication studies is a subfield within communication studies dedicated to the communication processes between two people or among small groups of people. Driven by social-psychological and interpretive approaches to communication studies, it began to take shape in the 1970s and is now one of the largest areas of study within communication studies. Interpersonal communication theories and framework largely presumed populations to be heterosexual and/or cisgender for decades. The specific lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) topics studied by interpersonal communication scholars or by scholars who integrate interpersonal communication perspectives reflect social and political dynamics. The acronym LGBTQ here pragmatically serves as a commonly used identifier although other identifiers (e.g., LGBTQ2S, LGBTQI2SA, LGBTQ+) merit equal recognition. Earlier studies focused on stereotyping, discrimination, stigma, coming out processes of gay men and then lesbians, and same-sex romantic and sexual relationships; the invisibility of bisexual and trans people was highlighted thereafter. While the earlier focus laid on sexual orientation, more recent studies address transgender issues and gender identity effects in interpersonal communication. With social, political, and legal acknowledgment of LGBTQ family relationships, scholars began to include studying interpersonal communication within LGBTQ families and relationships and between LGBTQ family members and their heterosexual and/or cisgender relatives. In the last two decades, scholarship by and about Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) has critiqued the dominance of whiteness in interpersonal communication studies, which also applies to LGBTQ interpersonal communication. BIPOC LGBTQ interpersonal communication dynamics remain understudied, as do other demographic groups within LGBTQ communities, such as people with disabilities, non-binary people, homeless people, veterans, or refugees. LGBTQ interpersonal communication studies appear disproportionately affected by a lack of keyword consistency. A wealth of studies in social sciences examines communication processes affecting LGBTQ people. However, these studies are conducted by scholars from a range of related disciplines and published in a transdisciplinary range of journals. They often omit interpersonal communication as a keyword so that the entirety of research knowledge in this area appears smaller than it actually is. This overview of key scholarly literature on LGBTQ people and topics represents scholarly literature that specifically mentions communication and that applies to interpersonal communication settings. Generally speaking, LGBTQ interpersonal communication scholarship could be characterized by a high number of pilot and single-case studies. Larger bodies of knowledge exist in very specific topic areas such as coming out, safer sex (often in the context of HIV/AIDS), and same-sex couple communication and parent-child communication. Examinations of the applicability and transferability of interpersonal communication constructs, instruments, and theories originating from heterosexual and cisgender samples are largely absent.

Decision model to integrate community preferences and nudges into the selection of alternatives in infrastructure development