Birth Race Research Articles

In Defense of Transracialism

Former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal's attempted transition from the white to the black race occasioned heated controversy. Her story gained notoriety at the same time that Caitlyn Jenner* graced the cover of Vanity Fair, signaling a growing acceptance of transgender identity. Yet criticisms of Dolezal for misrepresenting her birth race indicate a widespread social perception that it is neither possible nor acceptable to change one's race in the way it might be to change one's sex. Considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism. Although Dolezal herself may or may not represent a genuine case of a transracial person, her story and the public reaction to it serve helpful illustrative purposes.

The origins of Turkish Republican citizenship: the birth of race*

. This article explores the emergence of the dominance of racialised Turkish citizenship. Contrary to the conventional methods that investigate the early republican era, this paper starts by examining the final years of the Ottoman Empire with a special emphasis on the Balkan Wars as the birth of racialised technologies of citizenship. Then, I analyse the encounters between racialised thought in the Ottoman Empire in the twentieth century and its recurring counterpart in these encounters: ‘European modernity’. Next, I dwell on an illustration of a materialisation of racialised citizenship in the Ottoman Empire: the displacement and elimination of Armenian citizens. Finally, by probing the dominant strand of modern citizenship and nationhood in Europe, I articulate the commonalities of racialised citizenship in Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century. I conclude by arguing that race as a particular identity should not be seen as an institutionalised aspect of citizenship only in ostensibly ‘Oriental and absolutist regimes’. Instead, the focus should be on moments at which ‘European modernity’ and various nationalisms (racial, ethnic, cultural) mutually constitute each other.

Love in the Garden: Maud, Great Expectations, and W. S. Gilbert's Sweethearts

birth of race into innocence and fall of race into sin-are located in garden; only final redemption, which returns humankind to very bosom of God, is reserved for a realm beyond Nature. In centuries preceding Victorian age, gardens occupied a special place in English literary imagination: they are patently, if problematically, paradisiacal, in great Renaissance epics of Edmund Spenser and John Milton. Northrop Frye has remarked that the association of an ideal England with Eden, assisted by legends of a happy island in western ocean and by similarity of Hesperides story to that of Eden, runs through English literature at least from end of Greene's Friar Bacon to Blake's Jerusalem' hymn.1 Stephen Bann argues that tradition of conceiving garden as a utopian space is a peculiarly English one. Speak