Colonial Racism Research Articles

Annihilated Property: Slavery and Reproduction after Abolition

ABSTRACTClassical political economy yoked work’s value-giving capacity to the subsistence of the laboring community. This article traces the deformation of political economy’s concept of reproduction in the post-1807 West Indies, where the abolition of the slave trade had destroyed the conditions of a value form rooted not in labor’s subsistence, but in the deterioration of the working body. Tracking a crisis of West Indian reproduction through abolitionist poetry, plantation literature, and legal debate, I show how the imagination of a post-slavery future demanded that the theory of value be divorced from concepts of natural fertility (of land, of human bodies). The locus of this division of nature and value was the racialized body of the West Indian slave. Close readings of James Montgomery’s abolitionist epic The West Indies and Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor reveal how both liberal abolitionism and colonial racism gave form to emergent theories of political-economic surplus.

The ‘new Chinatown’: the racialization of newly arrived Chinese migrants in Singapore

ABSTRACTStudies of racism tend to rely on a presumed dichotomy between whites and ‘Others,’ whether Black or Asian. Even as many scholars have established that whiteness is manufactured, ethnographic studies of racism still have not escaped the color paradigm, basing their studies on the enactment of racism by white people on Others. Using the case study of Singapore, this article challenges the color paradigm by exploring racism between co-ethnic Chinese. I show that Singapore’s modernity is highly tied to place and that the ‘new Chinatown’ is used to ‘place’ and racialize newly arrived Chinese migrants. The racialization discourse, in this case, is subtle, and renders it a form of new racism - one that is reinforced by the media as well as state structures inherited from the nation’s colonial past. The aims of the article are two-fold: first, the paper aims to show parallels between the racialization of Chinese migrants in Singapore and colonial racism. However, this is not to say that locals are merely emulating colonial discourse which leads to the second aim of the paper: to locate this particular racialization process as a product of the intersection of global capital with Singapore’s local modernity. I conclude that although Singaporean-Chinese may enact racism against Chinese migrants, they do not hold unimpeded power. Rather, Singaporean-Chinese' construction of a ‘new Chinatown’ ironically acts to displace them.

A dramaturgia de Aimé Césaire: do drama histórico ao trágico moderno


 
 
 Os matizes da obra dramática do martinicano Aimé Césaire, entre o engajamento contra a dominação colonial e o racismo, assim como o exercício da liderança política em seu país, desdobram-se nas idas e vindas do tratamento textual e concepção de suas peças, do drama histórico ao uso da escrita paródica, passando pela forma de oratório trágico.
 
 

Returns to the wide world: errant Bohemian images of race and colonialism

ABSTRACTAlthough located at the centre of Europe, Bohemia was for much of its history dominated by a European empire. This essay reflects on a constellation of anti-racist, anti-colonial sentiments in the writings (1877–1944) of a number of Czechs who travelled to the Dutch East Indies. These feelings include an alienation from the imperial nations of “the West”; a sense of kinship with colonised peoples of “the East”; the collapsing – through images of blending and mirroring – of certain distinctions essential to colonial racism; and, often, a feeling of the absurdity of the Czech traveller’s own presence, ideas and dreams. An exploration of Bohemian perspectives and imagination, and a reflection on insignificance and being out of place, can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of European representations than that afforded by dominant colonial and postcolonial narratives that generalise about Europe based on views limited to the imperial nations.

Isolation and Inclusion: The Modulation of Limited and Plural Points of View in Jamaica Kincaid’sThe Autobiography of My Mother

In Autobiography of My Mother, Jamaica Kincaid utilizes alternating points of view to portray the novel’s overarching narratological, spatio-temporal, and ideological concerns. Kincaid crafts her story’s postmodern narrative in interesting ways by implementing both first-person-singular and first-person-plural points of view as aging protagonist, Xuela Richardson, reviews her life and tells her complicated, coming-of-age tale involving her ongoing struggle against colonial racism and the oppression of women. Often, the narrator speaks alone to explore the quest she is undertaking, a journey in which she receives little help from potential mentors in her colonial island setting, and here Kincaid relies on the singular view. Alternately, Kincaid switches to the plural view to portray the possibility for camaraderie that Xuela pursues in alliances with others, namely, women who might serve as potential mother figures but fail. In some instances, the protagonist speaks together with both family and community members to present their common thoughts regarding their shared sense of subjugation in Dominica’s island setting, yet these acts of co-narration do not bring her the solace she seeks. As the narrator contemplates her identity, one affected by her mother’s death, her father’s abandonment of her, her rejection by her stepmother and stepsister, and her dismissal by teachers and classmates, Xuela attempts to tell her story both alone and with others. Finally, however, Xuela discovers that any capacity for self-knowledge lies beyond her in an alienating world, and she remains displaced within Dominica’s culture.

Migration Revolution: Philippine Nationhood and Class Relations in a Globalized Age

Migration Revolution: Philippine Nationhood and Class Relations in a Globalized AgeFILOMENO V. AGUILAR JR.Singapore: NUS Press in association with Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2014, xii+293p.The central argument made by Filomeno Aguilar in Migration Revolution is that overseas migration, as it is occurring since 1960s, has brought about important social, cultural, and institutional changes in Philippine society. The migration of Filipinos overseas has become a crucial economic factor because of enormous remittances that they have generated every year. Migration has accordingly reconfigured class structure, transnationalized social relations, and engendered legal and discursive shifts pertaining to migrants' political participation and inclusion in Philippine state. It has also rekindled a sense of nationhood and national identity among migrant Filipinos, contributing to a profound reinterpretation of national narrative. Migration Revolution offers us a thorough examination of these changes and their consequences.Contemporary cross-border migration has enabled Philippine nation to envision itself within a plurality of nations, pushing Philippine state to reorient its foreign policy and redefined boundaries of both citizenship and nation across borders. It has also important emotive implications. The public outcry caused by execution of Flor Contemplacion in 1995, for example, marked not only a traumatic moment pointing at vulnerability of overseas labor migrants, but also produced unprecedented surges in Filipino transnationalism.The book is a collection of essays written by Aguilar over past decade and a half, mostly during his sojourns outside Philippines. He focused on Filipino migrants because the situations described here1) are somehow internal to, albeit not identical with, my own life experiences as one of them (p. 174). An important strength of book-and of Aguilar's scholarship in general-lies in his positionality as an itinerant scholar. Aguilar has generated precious data from his field research among migrant laborers and professionals in Southeast Asia as well as United States throughout his academic career. This research enabled him to draw important comparisons and analyze migrant transnationalism in its various manifestations. The result is an empirically grounded work that has greatly contributed to exploration and discussion of migrant transnationalism, challenging some of findings in academic work on migrant transnationalism that emerged in early 1990s. For instance Aguilar notes that same group of migrants is either considered as reneging on patriotism and thus to nation, or described as newfound transnationalists, thus identifying an academic discourse in South that runs counter to that in North (p. 175).The tensions generated by execution of Contemplacion in Singapore in 1995, where Aguilar was employed at time, led him to study of Philippine labor migration. His empathy for overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) is strongly evident in his writings, and his interest in labor migration from angles of social class and nationhood reveals his concerns for questions of status, belonging, and place as they relate to sentiments of nationhood and shame. In exploring these relationships, Aguilar looks back to nascent nationalism among young ilustrados2) in Europe, drawing an interesting parallel between Jose Rizal's and his comrades' reaction to colonial racism and its shaming of nation-cum-race, and today's sense of shame experienced by educated middle- and upper-class Filipinos for nationality they share with low-status OFWs. Underpinning these sentiments is not merely exasperation over being stereotyped, but also Filipino elite's discontent with having lost control over international image of nation.While labor migrants are being labeled as shameful export (p. …

The Politics of Race, Nationhood and Hindu Nationalism

The discussion on Hindu-Muslim conflict in India has revolved around religious or ethno-nationalist explanations. Employing the Gujarat riots of 2002 as a case study, I argue that dominant (Hindu) nationalism is linked to the ideas of “race” and has its roots in Brahminical notions of Aryanism and colonial racism. The categories of “foreign, hypermasculine, terrorist Other” widely prevalent in the characterisation of the Muslim Other, are not necessarily produced due to religious differences. Instead, social and cultural cleavages propagated by Hindu nationalists have their origins in race theory that accommodates purity, lineage, classification and hierarchy as part of the democratic discourses that pervade the modern nation-state. It focuses on how the state and non-state actors create discursive silences and normalise violence against minority communities by embodying emotions of fear, hate and anger among its participants to protect Hindu nationalism.

A Post/Decolonial View of Race and Identity Through the Narratives of U.S. International Students from the Global South

Using postcolonial and decolonial theory as a framework, this study focuses on the lived experiences of international students of color entering the United States for the first time in their lives from the global South. Our goal was to understand how they communicate/perform their dis/located identities in relation to “race” when immersed for the first time in a White settler society context. Findings from this qualitative study underscore discomfort with U.S.-centric race logics, production of ambiguity in relation to identity and race, and the growth of compassion for cultural Others as a result of becoming racial Other. The decolonial implications of such dis-identification with U.S. colonial race categories are discussed.

The German-Jew that Bandmann Drew: Daniel E. Bandmann’s Shylock on the Australian Colonial Stage, 1869–1870

ABSTRACTA particularly noteworthy tragedian enacting Shylock on the Australian colonial stage between 1869 and early 1870 was visiting German touring star Daniel Edward Bandmann (1840–1906). His Australian tour in its initial stages was framed within the discourse of legitimacy, based both on his success in mastering the English language and perhaps above all on his ability to withstand the test of critical English audiences. Yet, the reportage of his appearances as Shylock tracked a radical turn toward a dramaturgical reconceptualisation of the part. This paper contends two separate but interrelated points: that as a German-Jewish actor Bandmann’s Shylock both evoked the dramaturgical techniques of the British theatre in this role and pushed the limits of English conventions essentially to rework the enactment of Shylock for a modern Victorian audience for specific dramaturgical ends. The examination draws extensively on extant Australian colonial press ephemera covering Bandmann’s tour to re-read his enactment of the role as a revolution polarising the critical nineteenth-century debates about Shylock’s emotional aesthetic, and by extension, explores Bandmann’s influence in reimagining the so-called “Jew that Shakespeare Drew” in The Merchant of Venice. In this way, the analysis reclaims Bandmann’s dexterity in manipulating the potential of The Merchant of Venice to redirect audiences’ attention back to the conditions and representations of colonial race politics.

When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958 by Saheed Aderinto

When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958, by Saheed Aderinto. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2015. xviii, 241 pp. $95.00 US (cloth), $32.00 US (paper). In seven engaging chapters and an epilogue, Saheed Aderinto has produced a very important contribution to African social history and Nigerian historiography specifically. His intellectual journey, as revealed in his introduction, is a must read for graduate students for this book is the outcome of a scholar who listened closely to his sources and grappled with the complex realities they revealed. Aderinto had initially planned to write a history of gender and prostitution in colonial Nigeria by examining the correlation between sex work and social class. However, as he followed his sources along the pathways they presented, he came to appreciate that to do justice to the topic he had to engage multiple archives and literatures (6-7). Sexuality was of concern to legal, medical, social welfare, and military arms of the state, as well as multiple social groups including the clergy, nationalists, elite women, village elders, and landlords. While keeping these different actors and their competing perspectives and objectives in the same frame, Aderinto provides a clear and accessible narrative that locates the evolution of prostitution and state sanctions within the changes in the larger political economy. Sexuality, and more specifically prostitution, also raises questions of morality and Aderinto illustrates throughout the text the multiple ways in which discussions about morality and prostitution were further nuanced by ideas about race, gender, and class. Aderinto argues that African men and women were at the forefront of discussions to prohibit prostitution. Without creating monolithic or binary oppositions, he illustrates the points of conversion, overlap, and disagreement as Nigerian men, women, and different branches of the colonial state debated prostitution in public and in private. Africans too connected morality and prostitution; however, that connection unfolded in discourses that challenged colonial racism, critiqued colonial policy and practice, and anticipated a post-colonial future. The Lagos Women's League offered the first concerted effort to compel the government to prohibit prostitution (65). Motivated in part by a politics of respectability and guided by their cosmopolitan experiences in London, the Lagosian elite wanted the colonial state to invest similar levels of resources to address prostitution in Lagos. Both colonial officials and the Lagosian elite expressed moral panic about child prostitutes, and shared the developmentalist notion that mitigating adult crime required juvenile intervention (158). Whereas elite women imagined that they would play a significant role in the infrastructure created to address female delinquents, colonial officials could not imagine educated African women serving in any administrative capacity. …

Proximate Strangers and Familiar Antagonists: Violence on an Intimate Frontier

A generation of scholarship on the experiences of the frontier—spanning models of violent conflict to various kinds of intimacy—has been highly influential in building a nuanced picture of Australia's colonial race relations. Regionally-focused histories provide a valuable avenue for bringing these models of frontier historiography together within the same frame, because it is at the localised level of social relations that the cross-hatched intersections between violence and intimacy can emerge into clearest view. This article traces the threads of cross-cultural encounter on one Australian frontier to assess how violent conflict could arise as much from conditions of inter-connectedness and familiarity as from conditions of strangeness and fear, and to ask, under such conditions, what kinds of frontier violence drew the intervention of the law.

Nobody’s as Powerful as We Make Them Out to Be: A Psychopolitical Reading of The Third Life of Grange Copeland

<p>Alice Walker’s most prestigious novel <em>The Third Life of Grange Copeland </em>captures the critical aspects of colonial period. It depicts deconstruction of identity and interrogates the economic, political, and cultural basis of colonial period. The aim of this study is to use psychoanalytic concepts and ideas of Frantz Fanon to scrutinize the workings of power. How Walker investigates the pernicious workings of power, oppression, and class? To illustrate this, the paper relies upon Fanonian understanding of colonial racism. Fanon’s investigation of the psychic life of the colonial power is a helpful vehicle for unraveling varied ways that characters use to form subjectivity and individuation. How does the society form Grange’s struggle for individuation? The identity of Grange is under scrutiny in the light of key concepts of psychoanalytic criticism. He captures the strategies of resistance, negotiation, and return to the south to reach the individuation. The dialectic of the society and the citizens are an integral part of this study to see how Grange’s consciousness is shaped within a racist structure of power. Arguably, confronting with a racist ideology can drives the slaves to madness by persistent inculcation of considering black psyche as inferior.</p>

Caribbean “Race Men”: Louis Joseph Janvier, Demesvar Delorme, and the Haitian Atlantic

This paper reconsiders the work of two nineteenth-century Haitian authors, Demesvar Delorme and Louis Joseph Janvier, in light of their contributions to Haitian Atlantic humanism, a long-standing way of thinking the world through the nation state of Haiti in order to combat the twin axes of colonial racism and colonial slavery.

Painting between the lines: the Cape Verdean community of Colonial Dakar, 1920–1945

From the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, Cape Verdean immigrants to Dakar, colonial capital of French West Africa, became a small but important community in terms of significance in both the urban economy and the colonial framework of race and identity. They occupied important labor niches valuable to the colonizer such as painting and domestic work and attached those fields to a unique identity to which only they belonged. Able to capitalize on the ambiguity inherent to colonial race and identity policies, Cape Verdeans bridged categories common to state policies – particularly “foreign” and “native” – in ways not adequately captured by the concept of intermediaries often employed in examinations of immigrant populations to West Africa. Their insertion in Dakar reveals the permeability of such colonial concepts as well as the opportunities immigrants made in town.

Tammurriata Nera. Sessualità interrazziale nel secondo dopoguerra italiano

Since the liberal era, “half-breeds” have been one of the greatest problems Italian colonial racism had to face. From the initial absence of explicit prohibitions to useless and confused attempts to stop “interracial sexual unions” (long tolerated only in the form of the “madamato”), to the Empire’s final prohibition of “unions of conjugal nature” between “nationals” and “subjects” (which introduced the asymmetry of the entwined relationship of race and gender; see Sorgoni 1998), the “miscegenation” problem was continuously short circuited by the popular image that the racist discourse had helped construct. After WorldWar II, while the new republic attempted to put the ugliness of colonialism behind as the mere product of fascist barbarism, a heavy silence fell around the issue of the “mixed” children who were abandoned by their Italian fathers in Africa, while the birth of “mulatto” children by “Italian” women and non white allied soldiers, reintroduced the “problem” in the heart of the metropolis. In this paper , using archival documents, and iconographic, literary and cine-matographic sources, I analyze the strategies empluyed to conceal the unions and births of those who would represent, to cite an Italian deputy during a Constituent Assembly session in 1947) “the […] Nation’s abjection” because of the “Italian-black colour of their cheeks.” The analysis reveals the persistence of violent relationships of domination after the war, simultaneously “racial- ized” and “gendered”, which are still affecting our postcolonial present.

The Only Road to Sustainable Peace

In medical genetics, the field in which I specialize, we believe the correct diagnosis is the best guarantee of selecting the right therapy and improving prognosis. I’d like to offer a diagnosis of the injustice in Palestine/Israel: the morass that we are in was created by an ideology called Zionism, which overlooked the immorality of transforming a multireligious and multicultural Palestine into the Jewish State of Israel.The immoral ideology of Zionism is now being reevaluated in order to chart a better course forward instead of dealing cosmetically with its symptoms. Jews who have accepted this false idol of Zionism are leaving it in droves.Those with some conscience who still cling to Zionist notions are mostly driven by fear and are noting major setbacks in their ill- fated efforts. These efforts previously focused on giving us Palestinians a sliver of our lands and denying the most important right we need for peace: the right of refugees to return to their homes and lands.Our struggle is personal. On a deeper psychological level, the choice we have is between basing our actions on the worst elements of human history and daring to imagine and plan for a better future.I entreat all of my fellow human beings to shed the chains that they have built around their own minds and make a moral stand for peace, which can happen only if native Palestinians’ rights are respected. I predicted twenty years ago that the ardent right wing in Israel would gain more power. But I also predicted the growth of human consciousness at the grassroots level thanks to the internet and better global connectedness.The push for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) and similar nonviolent actions help accelerate the growing movement for Palestinian rights. Awareness is growing all around us, and we see people mixing everywhere (including by intermarriage) and rejecting the notion of “us here–them there.” The trends are encouraging, and our job is to accelerate them in time to save ourselves and this beautiful planet. We cannot limit our struggle to Palestinian liberation alone—we must also take on the challenges of global warming, nuclear weapons, and the cascading fanaticism of religion- based states in Western Asia.There are no win- lose or lose- win scenarios (not that this was ever a binary struggle). Here in (historic) Palestine, the lines of the struggle are also now clearer than ever: either you are siding with colonial racism and segregation, or you are committed to transforming the “Holy Land” (Israel/Palestine/Canaan) into a secular, pluralistic democracy for its people (who happen to be Jews, Christians, Muslims, Bahá’ís, atheists, and others). The latter is the only road to sustainable peace, and it happens to be a win-win scenario for all. It is moral and it is doable, but we cannot afford to stand on the sidelines.

Guilty of lese-racism: A court judgement for the crime of union of conjugal nature between citizens and subjects

The text takes its cue from a 1939 court judgment regarding a “racial” crime and goes on to analyse the characteristics of fascist colonial racism, which throughout this period was undergoing significant changes. The assertion of the superiority of the “white race” moves from common social discrimination of the liberal period, to an assertion of superiority codified in law and the basis of the native policy. The custom of white men (usually soldiers) taking local black women as sexual partners – so-called “madamato”, which was both racist and sexist, becomes the main target of State repression, in the name of a rigid separation and hierarchical classification of the “races”.

Civil rights in America's African diaspora: Firestone Rubber and segregation in Liberia

In 1926, the United States (US) company Firestone Rubber in Akron, Ohio initiated a second practice of segregation in Liberia. The first practice began with the minority regime of the Afro-American settlers over 17 ethnic groups in the Republic of Liberia in 1847. Civil rights were unheard of in Liberia during either of these two periods. This changed when Liberian students travelled to the US on government scholarships, primarily to study in historical black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the 1940s and 1950s. When the Liberian students were exposed to the Civil Rights Movement, they fully understood the injustice of the situation in Liberia. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr and others travelled to the Gold Coast for its transition into becoming the nation of Ghana on 6 March 1957. Meetings between King and Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah led to collaborative efforts towards ending colonial racism in Africa and segregation in the US. During the Cold War, segregation in the US and Liberia was a source of shame for both nations. Liberian students returning from the US began “sit-ins” in protest against segregated Firestone facilities. The Liberian government responded by enacting its first Civil Rights Act against Firestone in 1958 and ending discrimination, except in segregated schools. This article shows, however, that it took more than another 30 years for the first decolonisation process to end the minority regime after the Civil Rights Acts of 1958, and to end the original form of ethnic segregation, which began in 1847 and ended as a result of the violent civil wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

Uniting Christian Students� Association�s pilgrimage to overcome colonial racism: A southern African postcolonial missiological dialogue

World Christianity has been enriched by Christian student movements such as the Uniting Christian Students� Association (UCSA) from South Africa. This article, based on my recent doctoral research, starts with the affirmation of the ambiguous relations of these movements with colonial racism. However, faced with new challenges in a postcolonial context, there are key impulses to be gained by an inter-subjective, but also interdisciplinary dialogue with these movements as they negotiate their calling. By focussing on one movement within the southern African context, UCSA, in particular its formation and development since the demise of apartheid in South Africa, the article aims to present an attempt to understand the missionary praxis of UCSA through a postcolonial missiological matrix. The article draws on the theological disciplines of missiology, systematic theology, church history, contextual theology, as well as the methodologies in non-theologic disciplines like sociology, in particular social movement studies, and history. The findings show, amongst others, a growing complexity in relation to its agency, how it frames its world and also how it used its authoritative sources to discern its calling. The article closes with some key insights and pointers relevant for faith communities in their mission to overcome colonial racism.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The teaching and research in missiology and systematic theology in how the challenge of colonial racism is addressed, methodologically.

The black lector and Martín Morúa Delgado’s Sofía (1891) and La familia Unzúazu (1901)

This article offers a corrective to a prominent scholarly misreading of Martin Morua Delgado’s (1856–1910) two novels, Sofia (1891) and La familia Unzuazu (1901). Taking into account Morua’s nearly 10-year exile in the United States and recovering him for Latina/o studies allows readers to finally uncover the revolutionary nature of Morua’s fiction: he did not wish to educate white readers through his novels, but to empower and politicize black lectores. Specifically, Morua warned black Cubans that it was no longer colonial racism that they needed to combat; now, they would also have to battle a US conception of race.