Racial Formation Research Articles

Black Irony: Modernism, Mimicry, and African America in Lewis Nkosi’s Drama

ABSTRACT: Like many Black intellectuals that came of age as apartheid was tightening its grip in the 1950s, Lewis Nkosi (1936–2010) left South Africa on a one-way ticket. Although he outlived apartheid and returned to his native land on and off after 1991, he lived abroad in the United States in the 1990s and in Europe in the 2000s. Although allied with the African National Congress in exile, he wrote skeptically about emphatic anti-apartheid writing. His essays from the 1950s on reflect his preference for cosmopolitan and experimental authors from Dostoyevsky to Kafka, in other words for modernism broadly speaking, and his creative writing reflects this preference in the ironic and satirical rather than the usual earnest treatment of the struggle. While several critics have noted this modernist preference, none have examined the influence of Black American authors on Nkosi’s writing. This omission demands attention, as Nkosi’s creative writing, especially drama for stage and radio, draws deeply from Black Americans, even when he steals themes, phrases, and characters without acknowledging sources. The Rhythm of Violence written and performed during his first US sojourn 1960–61, borrows style and phrasing from Black Beat poet Ted Joans, the radio drama “We Can’t All Be Martin Luther King,” broadcast on BBC 4 in 1971, lifts title and tone—unacknowledged—from activist-writer Julian Bond’s ironic poem responding to expectations that all Black intellectuals emulate Dr. King, and The Black Psychiatrist borrows from the decidedly unironic Black nationalist Amiri Baraka. Like Bond and essayist James Baldwin, Nkosi balanced a commitment to struggle—in his case, presenting Black African and Caribbean writers to the BBC and to readers abroad—with an ironic attitude to what he called the absurdity of apartheid and other forms of racism.

Reimagining the State

Reimagining the State Lisa Duggan (bio) What is the state? How do we grasp it, engage it, transform it? These are the broad questions to which this issue of WSQ is addressed. The articles and reviews here take concrete historical approaches to the dilemmas that social movements face in relation to state formations, as they are intertwined with racial capitalism and with shifting arrangements of intimacy and care. Right now, it can seem that the primary options are (1) grassroots organizing against the punitive, coercive, violent carceral and surveillance state, as in prison abolition and campaigns to defund the police; (2) social democratic reforms to claim state resources, as in the fight for universal accessible health- and childcare; or (3) organizing to protest the exploitation and violence at the nexus of corporate and state profit machines, as in protests of oil pipelines and environmental degradation. As this issue shows, the landscape of possibility is more complicated—these options overlap and are always shifting. And the deep intersections of formations of class, race, Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, religion, and ability defy any easy division between class and so-called identity politics. The materiality of everyday life draws us into the ways class is lived as race, gender is deployed by religion, and Indigenous history upends common assumptions about states and sovereignty. In this essay, I want to provide two examples of political dilemmas and interventions that illuminate some dead ends and some new thinking about social movements and the state. The first is from Latin America and the second from Palestine. [End Page 243] Latin America During spring 2021, I signed an open letter addressed to the editors of the socialist journals Monthly Review and Jacobin complaining about their coverage of the 2021 election in Ecuador. The two hundred signers of the letter are all aligned with left projects and formations. Our complaint was focused on the journals' representation of the candidate of some Ecuadoran Indigenous social movements, Yaku Pérez, and his political party, Pachakutik. They portrayed him as a Trojan horse for the left's most bitter neoliberal enemies (Signatories 2021). The election came on the heels of the unpopular government of Lenín Moreno, the successor to the decade-long dominance of Rafael Correa of the Alianza País. Moreno had moved substantially to the right of Correa's left-wing socialist, anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal government. The election of Correa had been an achievement of the "pink tide" in Latin America, but over time that government's reliance on extractivist practices for income generation, and their severe crackdown on dissenting social protest movements, generated opposition among anti-extractivist Indigenous groups. The Indigenous movement and its political party, while far from politically or ideologically monolithic, generated alternative visions for left governing, including feminist and queer components and offering an eco-socialist conception of land and resource use along with visions of radically inclusive democracy. The first round of elections in February 2021 at first looked like it would result in a runoff between Correa's candidate, Andrés Arauz, and the Pachakutik candidate, Yaku Pérez. But the surprising result was a runoff between Arauz and the neoliberal banker Guillermo Lasso. The conflict surrounding the runoff on the left was fierce (Peralta 2021). Pérez charged electoral fraud, and Pachakutik advised their supporters to spoil their ballots rather than vote for either of the two remaining candidates. Pérez had himself been assaulted, arrested, and imprisoned for protest activity. The general criminalization of protest and the extension of extractivist policies by Correaists meant that an Arauz victory loomed as an existential threat to the existence of the Indigenous movement. There could be no support for a neoliberal Lasso government either. This was a strategic gambit, not an ideological choice. But understandably the Arauz forces considered this position a profound betrayal of the overall left project. Not only Correa supporters specifically, but sections of the international left saw the failure of Pérez and his allies to support Arauz against a neoliberal banker as evidence of hidden neoliberal sympathies. Thus the Trojan horse charge. [End Page 244] The point of the open letter was to push back against that charge...

North Carolina's Free People of Color, 1715–1885

Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. revisits a subject John Hope Franklin examined in 1943 in The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790–1860. Franklin's core tenet was that the state's “free Negro” inhabitants formed “a caste within a caste,” their lives limited and determined by racial discrimination (John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1943, p. 164). Milteer's premise, conversely, is that free status was a more important attribute than race. He argues that throughout the period before 1865, “the legal position of free people of color generally remained closer to that of whites than to that of slaves” (p. 2). Milteer's demotion of race as a signifier begins, appropriately, with a deconstruction of the concept of race. Understanding race as a cultural construct rather than a biological fact is not new. (Franklin remarked in passing that many of the state's “free Negroes” had white fathers.) But for Franklin, racial identity, however arbitrarily determined, was fixed. Milteer depicts racial identity as fluid and contingent. He provides numerous examples of individuals and families who, over time were alternately described, or defined themselves, as Black, mulatto, Indian, or (more rarely) white, as their neighbors and circumstances either allowed or demanded.

Racialized xenophobia and the uneven distribution of welcome to foreigners in Brazil

How does xenophobia manifest itself in societies whose capitalism was structured through colonialism? To what extent can studies on contemporary manifestations of racism help to understand xenophobia in these societies? In this work, we rely on the Fanonian concept of racialization to investigate the genesis and function of migratory policies in republican Brazil. To this end, we return to important histori-cal landmarks that allow the relationship between capitalism, racism and immigra-tion in Brazil to be highlighted. As a result, we suggest that the migratory policies in the country corresponded to national, racial and class interests that imposed a par-ticular dynamic on them, not properly contemplated by some explanatory models, thought from Europe. To account for this particularity, we suggest the concept of racialized xenophobia.

Oriental Ornaments: Yellowface and Painful Object(ification)s in Sanders’s Ghost in the Shell

Rupert Sanders’s live-action adaptation Ghost in the Shell (2017) is singular within the franchise for manifestly bringing into focus the sociocultural and political dimensions of subjectivation and interpellation through casting. This film crystalizes entanglements of race, gender, and sexuality in both narrative and production. This article argues that the red-robed geisha illuminates the méconnaissance of surface and embodiment, thereby providing a lens through which we can interrogate not just the re-presentation of race but also its spectrality and paradoxical dis/embodiment. Actor Rila Fukushima’s performance serves as a double projection: as a performer, her enactment is a projection on film; as the red-robed geisha, the film re-presents her as a “yellow” woman, literally masked as a “perfected” version of herself. Her Asianness is ornamental and made infinitely wearable, pinpointing her imbrication not only in objectification, but also in the convoluted symbiosis between ornamentation as racialization (and vice versa) and racial melancholia. By focusing on the film’s production and re-presentation of Fukushima, this article posits that her double projection shows how the shifting surfaces of racial formation and the pathology of racial melancholia are clearly intertwined.

Long-term housing recovery among Mexican immigrants: How service providers navigate racialized anti-immigrant disaster recovery policies

Disasters are increasing in frequency and intensity. Much of the current disaster literature adopts a social vulnerability perspective, which considers how political, social, and economic factors influence pre-disaster preparation and post-disaster recovery. Even with this focus, however, there remains a dearth of literature on immigrant populations and their long-term recovery trajectories. This paper applies a racial formation framework to a disaster context. I seek to show how service providers from community-based organizations (CBOs) navigate racialized anti-immigrant disaster recovery policies to help the Mexican immigrant community in Houston, Texas with their long-term housing recovery after Hurricane Harvey. I conducted semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations with service providers from CBOs located in Houston that serve this population with post-disaster housing. I argue that the disaster recovery system is comprised of racial structures and racialized anti-immigrant policies, passively and actively limiting the access to resources for the Mexican immigrant community. I found that to challenge the racial structures and racialized anti-immigrant policies of the disaster recovery system, service providers assist the community through direct assistance to Mexican immigrants excluded from other programs; collaboration with other organizations to combine limited resources; helping the community navigate racialized anti-immigrant bureaucracy; and building trust by embedding themselves in the victimized community. However, findings also show that these organizations face significant challenges in conducting their work. This research brings a much-needed theoretical expansion of race and racialization theories to disaster research.

The Education of Milkman Dead: The Bildungsroman as Aesthetic Cycle in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Abstract: Rational critique of one’s existential condition and questions of why, where, when, who, what dominate Morrison’s Song of Solomon. As she clearly shows in the novel, it is in finding answers to these questions that one is better able to deal with one’s existential condition and, where necessary, to make the transition from fragmentation to wholeness as a subject dealing with the history and experience of a racial formation that renders one either as an object or inferior other. In Song, the site of the exploration of these questions is the familial space and the marginal public constituted by black America, through which their unheard voices are given full play. Straddling the various familial spaces and marginal public is the novel’s protagonist, Milkman Dead, whose growth away from a selfish, materialistic young man Morrison tells magically as a bildungsroman, textual revision, and aesthetic cycle.

Semiperipherality and the Taiwanese American Novel

Abstract: While Asian American authors have certainly produced narratives of return to their or their predecessors' countries of origin, these narratives have, until recently, predominantly appeared in memoir and autobiography. Since the turn of the millennium there's been a significant uptick in the fictional portrayal of return. In stark contrast to the spiritual and filial returns in memoir, these fictional portrayals tend not to sentimentalize return. The protagonists who return more often follow economic or professional trajectories. In novels like Tao Lin's Taipei (2013), Ling Ma's Severance (2018), Han Ong's The Disinherited (2004), Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Brian Ascalon Roley's American Son (2001), and Lucy Tan's What We Were Promised (2018), return to Asia intensifies rather than vitiates material structures of alienation. What we find is that they tend to undermine an emerging Twenty-first century racial form that welds the Asian to neoliberal flexibility, even if they often forego critique. This article will describe contemporary Asian/American return fictions in contrast to earlier manifestations of the genre and explore their problematic relationship to categories like Asian American and Anglophone Asian fiction.

Democratic Realism, National Allegory, and the Future of the Asian American Novel

AbstractRecent fiction by Asian Americans grapples with, on the one hand, the waning stakes and political failure of American identity (a democratic realism), and, on the other hand, the allure of Asia’s simultaneous capitalist challenge and alternative to US-based racial form (a capitalist realism). This article argues that the tensions and contradictions of this conjuncture are registered in recent Asian American novels via national allegory and reads the aesthetic partition between comedy and tragedy in Marie Myung-ok Lee’s 2022 novel The Evening Hero as exemplary of this formal approach.If the transnational turn promised a way out of US democratic realism and the dominance of its ethnographic imperative, then how have recent Asian American novels registered the process of turning to Asia and away from America?

Countering anti-Blackness with migrant solidarity: Black and Caribbean linkages through racial struggle

ABSTRACT Black Caribbean migrants are uniquely positioned between multiple forms of negative racialization – that of their experiences with both anti-Black racism and xenophobia due to their immigrant status. Such positioning means that they may be subject to increased anti-Black and anti-migrant policing. In this paper, I argue that Black Caribbean migrants’ experiences with race in the United States can and should be interwoven with research and advocacy focused on the increasing criminalization of migrants or, Crimmigration research. I use archived newspapers, fliers, and pamphlets produced by Caribbean activists to show how they not only recognized these two-fold processes and but also reframed Black identity and politics to include anti-Black and anti-migrant discrimination as linked causes. I contend that their advocacy and concern for Afro-descent migrants, African Americans, and migrants more broadly reveal the expansiveness of Black politics through the bringing together of both Black and migrant concerns.

Peculiarities of the sunflower breeding for resistance to broomrape (orobanche cumana wallr.)

Purpose and Objectives. Our purpose was to find available information on the sunflower breeding for resistance to the broomrape. To achieve this purpose, we solved following tasks: to review publications covering the history and current state of research into the subject; find out the specifics of such studies; and to highlight the main unresolved issues for the organization of further work.
 Materials and Methods. Publications of Ukrainian and foreign scientists became the material for the study: articles in journals and conference abstracts.
 Results and Discussion. In the article, publications covering domestic and foreign studies of the peculiarities of sunflower breeding for resistance to the parasitic plant Orobanche cumana Wallr. are collected and reviewed. The changes in the race composition of the parasite since the beginning of the 19th century, which have accelerated in recent years, are described. Experiments and breeding for resistance to the broomrape began in 1909-1913, when there was only one (the first) broomrape race A. Currently, the existence of the seventh race (G) and the broomrape biotypes affecting race G-resistant sunflower accessions has been recognized in the world. During the last 20 years, the appearance of new broomrape races was observed in the countries where sunflowers are grown with violations of crop rotation requirements.
 Marking resistance genes of domestic plants and determining the molecular polymorphism of both host and parasitic plants are important problems of genetics, solving of which is aimed at the improvement of sunflowers in terms of resistance to the broomrape. The identification of genes of resistance to the broomrape and the development of methods for their marking are discussed. Studies in the genetics of resistance to O. cumana are limited by few relevant molecular markers. Scientists announced that they had onstructed a molecular genetic map of linkage groups with the Or7 gene of resistance to race G. Genetic studies of the broomrape as a plant are mainly focused on the structure and genetic diversity of parasite populations. The broomrape aggressiveness depends on weather and climate, so an increase in temperatures and lack of precipitation can lead to the broomrape spread over large areas. Scientists adapt the phytotron test for resistance to the broomrape to modern equipment, developing certain methodological subtleties. In addition, new methods of evaluation are developed: histological and molecular genetic assessments
 Conclusions. The sunflower broomrape is one of the main biotic factors that harm the crop fields. The peculiarity of the breeding for resistance is associated with continuous formation of new races of the parasite. Studies by scientists from different countries on the formation of new physiological races of the broomrape indicate the annually growing threat from the parasite, the need for constant monitoring of broomrape populations and the continuous development of research in this direction. Several genes of resistance to the broomrape have been identified; methods of their marking have been developed; this ensures success in improving the existing and developing new progressive approaches in the sunflower breeding for resistance to the parasite. The specificity of control of resistance to the broomrape, which is determined by genetic factors, was established. Thus, genetic methods are the best ones to fight against the broomrape. However, inheritance patterns of resistance to new, virulent, widespread in Ukraine broomrape races are not described in the literature, though it is important for the creation of commercial hybrids. The relationships between resistance to new virulent broomrape races, which are common in Ukraine, and valuable economic characteristics in F1 hybrids should be also studied. Taking into account the recent climatic changes, in particular a rise in air temperatures and consequences of this global process, one can predict an increase in the intensity of damage to sunflowers by the parasite, which prompts breeders of the crop to combine resistance to adverse abiotic factors and resistance to the broomrape

Conceptualizations of Race: Essentialism and Constructivism

Demonstrating how race is socially constructed has been a core sociological objective, yet many individuals continue to hold essentialist and other concepts of what races are and how to account for group differences. These conceptualizations have crucial consequences for intergroup attitudes, support for social policies, and structures of inequality, all of which are key sociological concerns; yet much of the research in this area has emerged outside of sociology. Our review of this interdisciplinary scholarship describes the range of views people hold, the attitudes and behaviors associated with them, and what factors contribute to these views. We focus primarily on essentialism and constructivism, although we describe the greater variety of beliefs beyond this dichotomy, as well as fluidity in how people use these concepts. We conclude by presenting research on strategies for reducing essentialist belief systems and identifying key areas for future research.

Against the Grain: The Poetics of Non-Normative Masculinity in Decadent French Literature. By Mathew Rickard

In this book, Mathew Rickard capably and enthusiastically studies ‘the literary representation of non-normative masculinity at a time when masculinity was perceived to be in crisis’ (p. 18). For Rickard, the fin-de-siècle masculinity crisis ‘ironically allowed greater representation of alternative behaviours and identities precisely due to the questioning of masculinity that was occurring’ (p. 18). Are there places and times when masculinity is not in crisis for someone? How are we to decide if one individual’s masculinity crisis is of wider consequence? Rickard, who situates his writers in the context of the loss of the Franco-Prussian War, concerns about depopulation, struggles for women’s emancipation, and a new sexological interest in ‘perversity’, wonders if masculinity is ‘inherently toxic’ or if ‘queerer, intersectional, even healthier forms of masculinity [can] flourish’ (p. 13). Do all non-normative forms of masculinity array themselves on the side of the queer? Is the queer always a ‘healthier’ or more progressive option? Rickard’s book joins a fascinating body of recent work addressing these difficult questions. Marlon B. Ross’s Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), for instance, is interesting to read in parallel with Rickard’s volume. At one point, Ross tellingly juxtaposes James Baldwin and Truman Capote. Baldwin is Ross’s exemplar of successful insurgency. Capote’s masculinity, for all its non-normative misfittedness, is one some might qualify as counter-insurgent. ‘Sissiness is manifested differently in different racial formations’, Ross suggests (Sissy Insurgencies, p. 29). Racial formations per se do not come up in Rickard’s study, but he mentions, for instance, ‘the intersection of class and masculinity’ (Against the Grain, p. 46). I might tend to surmise that at least one or two of the four figures Rickard studies fall mostly on the Capote side of things (non-normative masculinity being a privilege aligned with other social entitlements) rather than the Baldwin one, but perhaps Rickard would have a different view. Clusters of interrelated social variables specific to different socio-cultural contexts are crucial to the evaluation of any instance of non-normative masculinity. Forms of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ are themselves plural in most historical contexts. When Jean Lorrain and Joris-Karl Huysmans, from their very different social locations, engage with ‘masculinity’, are they engaging with the same thing? Are all people who exhibit non-normative masculinity ‘adversely affected by the laws of the Patriarchy’ (p. 11) to the same degree and in the same way? Rickard begins his demonstration with Huysmans’s À rebours (1884), exploring how ‘non-normative men can appropriate a hegemonic identity through engaging with literature’ (p. 60). He then examines how, in Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas (1901), ‘the representation of witchcraft […] links to the presentation of non-normative masculinity through comparable engagement with marginal practices’ (p. 65). The third chapter studies Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus (1884) and La Tour d’amour (1899), and shows how in Rachilde’s work, a reconfigured masculinity can be found in both ‘passive’ men and some women. In a final chapter, on Octave Mirbeau’s Le Calvaire (1886), Rickard takes up the topic of impotence (literal and figurative, real and fictional) to probe what kind of an achievement textual (as well as real life) ‘masculine author(ity)’ might be (p. 170). Sometimes Rickard writes that things are ‘inherently queer’ (pp. 69, 119; my emphasis): occulture in the Lorrain chapter for instance, or, in Rachilde’s crafty hands, normative masculinity itself. I wonder if the materials Rickard so richly details for his readers might rather encourage us to think relationally, and to come to understand how not all stances that fail to be normative necessarily qualify as queer or insurgent or progressive.

African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry

African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry

Race-Making across Empires: The Racial Formation of Louisiana’s Filipino Communities from the Antebellum Era through Jim Crow

Race-Making across Empires: The Racial Formation of Louisiana’s Filipino Communities from the Antebellum Era through Jim Crow Michael Menor Salgarolo (bio) At the height of southern Jim Crow and the dawn of America’s colonial empire in the Pacific, Filipino nationalist intellectual Sixto López paid a visit to Louisiana. López was surprised to learn that communities of Filipino fishermen had settled in Louisiana’s bayous decades before America’s colonization of the Philippines in 1898. He was even more surprised to see the way they were treated by their white neighbors. “[I]t might be thought,” wrote López, “that in New Orleans, where southern racial or ‘color’ prejudice is said to run to extremes, the Filipinos would be subjected to all the disabilities and prejudices attaching to the negro.” López found, however, that such was not the case. He noted that many Filipinos had close personal and commercial relationships with Cajuns, Italians, and the other white inhabitants of southern Louisiana. Many Filipino fishermen had married white women and sent their children to white schools. The apparent lack of discrimination faced by Filipinos in Louisiana was all the more unexpected given the context of American colonialism in the Philippines, where the United States justified its domination of the islands by propagating the notion that Filipinos were racially unfit for self-governance. While “in his own country, [the Filipino] is a semi-savage, incapable of exercising the rights of citizenship,” López observed, “the Filipinos of New Orleans are in all respects treated as white men.”1 [End Page 25] By the time of López’s arrival, Filipino men had established settlements in lower Louisiana for nearly half a century.2 Their arrival was a result of Western commercial expansion into East Asia in the nineteenth century. As Spain’s imperial government began to open Philippine ports to trade with all nations, a spike in foreign commerce led to a demand for native Philippine sailors, known in the English-speaking world as “Manilamen.” Often recruited through deception or coercion, “Manilamen,” like nineteenth-century sailors of all nationalities, frequently evaded brutal working conditions by deserting when ships came to port. Filipino deserters formed communities in port cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Liverpool, and Barcelona and built fishing villages in Australia’s Torres Strait and Kalk Bay, South Africa.3 In Louisiana, Filipino sailors established a semi-autonomous settlement at a place called Bayou St. Malo, located deep in the coastal marshes of St. Bernard Parish. St. Malo was named for Juan San Maló, the leader of an eighteenth-century Black maroon community who lived on the site.4 By the late nineteenth century, St. Malo had become home to nearly 150 people, mostly Filipino fishermen and their families.5 [End Page 26] In this article, I contextualize López’s observations about race by reconstructing the racial formation of Louisiana Filipinos from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth.6 Using newspapers, census manuscripts, memoirs, and court records, I shed light on a process shaped by both imperial racial knowledge and local racial ideologies. Much of the historical literature on Asian American migration to the U.S. South has focused on the issue of racial formation. A number of important studies have focused on the segregated South in the mid-twentieth century, seeking to answer the paradigmatic question, “where did the Asian sit on the segregated bus?” Scholars have built on Leslie Bow’s nuanced understanding of Asian Americans in the South as “interstitial” figures whose presence reveals both the limits and the flexibility of Jim Crow’s Black-white racial binary.7 These studies form part of a growing field of writing on “third” or “inbetween” peoples in the South and the nation that examines the ways non-Black racialized peoples have navigated, challenged, and upheld systems of white supremacy rooted in anti-Black racism.8 Scholars have tackled similar questions in studies of Creoles of color in New Orleans, seeking to understand how this population of mixed European and African descent claimed rights and defined their social identities within the rigid [End Page 27] Black-white racial binary...

George White and the Victorian Army in India and Africa: Serving the Empire, by Stephen M. Miller

Reviewed by: George White and the Victorian Army in India and Africa: Serving the Empire by Stephen M. Miller M. C. Smith (bio) George White and the Victorian Army in India and Africa: Serving the Empire, by Stephen M. Miller; pp. ix + 323. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $139.99, $139.99 paper, $109.00 ebook. Stephen M. Miller has produced a serviceable new biography of an eminent Victorian soldier, Field Marshal Sir George Stuart White, an understated yet important player in the shaping of the late-Victorian army. George White and the Victorian Army in India and Africa: Serving the Empire opens with a bit of historiography, making the valid point that White deserves an updated biography; the only substantial treatment of his life was written shortly after his death by a friend and colleague, Mortimer Durand. Although Durand’s work was no hagiography, he did treat his friend—and the upper command structure of the Victorian army—kindly. The result was an incomplete story of the life of an influential late-Victorian soldier and administrator. Miller has produced a biography with perhaps a greater degree of objectivity than Durand’s, with the added perspective of an additional century of hindsight to set the context of White’s life and his impact on Victorian military thought. White served during an era of major change as the British Army marched toward the twentieth century, and his opinions and observations provide insight to the effects of modernization, professionalization, and the upheaval of the Cardwell Reforms. [End Page 707] Miller provides but a brief sketch of White’s childhood, then picks up White’s military career with his education at Sandhurst in the early 1850s. He details the professional doldrums of a newly commissioned officer’s life and the frustrated quest for distinction in a series of desultory postings. Distinction came with a Victoria Cross earned during the Second Afghan War, along with notice by Frederick Sleigh Roberts, just as he was elevated as Lord Roberts of Kandahar. The intraservice rivalries between the partisans of Lord Roberts and the Ashanti Ring (a coterie of officers attached to another of Britain’s top soldiers, Sir Garnet Wolseley) formed a key theme in White’s life as he advanced in rank and honors. White was sometimes whipsawed between these polarities, and his experiences offer a glimpse of the factional and personal relationships/rivalries that so often determined the extension or withdrawal of a plum command appointment. Miller follows White’s career in high command from his experience as a brigadier in the conquest of Burma (1885–9) and service in Baluchistan (1889–92) through to his final posting as Governor of Gibraltar (1900–12). He pays particular attention to White’s tenure as Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Establishment from 1893 to 1898. The two chapters that detail his actions as chief military administrator and commander explore (among other things) the concept of so-called martial races in the armies of the Raj and White’s thoughts on the validity of the notion. The latter of these two chapters devotes significant ink to the situation on the Northwest Frontier in 1897 and 1898, culminating in the controversial Tirah Campaign, from both military and political vantage points. It is rather well done. Miller develops a minor chord of race (as defined by nineteenth-century standards) relations through White’s position as an Anglo-Irish landowner and officer. Miller conducted thorough research in the production of this work. His primary sources range from an extensive collection of White’s private papers, journals, and letters, to unpublished official files from the Public Record Office in Kew, to a substantial array of published public documents. He recognizes the need to read what the Victorians had to say about themselves and then-current events as a key to deciphering their social views, mores, and expectations, and consulted a significant number of contemporary or near-contemporary publications. Miller’s use of contemporary secondary sources is balanced with a selection of modern Victorian scholarship. This allows him to paint a vivid picture of late-Victorian military life without merely appearing as a ventriloquist’s dummy seated on John Bull’s...

Inospitalidade e Estranhamento do Outro: A Discriminação do Mercado

Considering Michel Foucault’s two main courses on the general theme of biopolitics, namely, Il faut défendre la société (1997; 1999), a course for the academic year of 1976, and La naissance de la biopolitique (2004; 2008), taught by his turn in 1978/1979, I intend to consider that we are experiencing a new form of racism, this time no longer a state type, as already considered by Foucault, but a type of racism provoked and economically fomented, therefore, a market racism. Racism whose traces must be sought not exactly in economic theories, but among the historical agents par excellence of the market, that is, entrepreneurs in the exercise of their businesses. For this, I will focus, for the moment, on presenting market racism from the perspective of German business during the Third Reich, in Germany.

Jews as Non-Aryans: The Vatican's Ambivalent Embrace of Fascist Italy's Racialization of Jews

In the summer of 1938, Italy's Fascist regime announced its new ‘racial’ policy, soon to be followed by a series of draconian racial laws. The policy was based on the principle that Catholic Italians were of the Aryan race and Jewish Italians belonged to a separate race of non-Aryans. Previously the Vatican had made no such racial distinction. Yet, notwithstanding the frequent claim that the Church has never distinguished between Catholics and Jews on racial grounds, the Vatican quickly began to assimilate to the Fascist state's distinction of Jews as racially marked as non-Aryan. The opening in 2020 of the Vatican archives for the papacy of Pius XII (1939–58) has made available a huge trove of documents bearing on the way the pope and the Vatican secretariat of state dealt with Italy's racial laws and with the subsequent persecution of Italy's Jews during German occupation. As shown in this article, these documents make clear the Vatican's use of racial language and racial concepts as it dealt with the racial laws and the persecution of Italy's Jews from the time the racial laws were introduced in 1938 to the years of the Holocaust.

Anti-environmentalism and the natural ‘wages of whiteness’

ABSTRACT W.E.B. Du Bois’ theorization of the ‘wages of whiteness’ has factored prominently into recent scholarship examining the roots of Trumpism and resurgent right-wing movements in the United States. How might the ‘wages of whiteness’ shed light on contemporary anti-environmental politics? To provide insight into this question, I put Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America, as well as more recent work in whiteness studies, into conversation with environmental and social histories of the mid-nineteenth century frontier. I observe that struggles over access to and control over land and natural resources, and anger over exposure to polluted air and water, were central to class and racial formation during an historical period that continues to weigh heavily on contemporary American politics. I argue that understanding the origins and evolution of the natural wages of whiteness can help us develop strategies for combating anti-environmentalism and mobilizing in pursuit of environmental justice.

Aspiration and Self-Realization: The Ameliorative Projects of Steve Biko

Work on the conceptual amelioration of race concepts is usually negative or critical: it uncovers social features that contribute to racial hierarchies. Much less focus has been placed on how ameliorative accounts contribute to positive change. Using an account of race developed by Steve Biko during South African apartheid, I will argue that we can extract a novel account of positive amelioration in which racial categories can have normative or aspirational force, contributing to positive change.