Definitions Of Race Research Articles

Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona by Eric V. Meeks (review)

Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona. By Eric V. Meeks. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. Pp. 342. Illustrations, maps, figures, notes, selected bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0-29271-699-5. $24.95, paper.) Eric Meeks’s first book is one of the most interesting and insightful works in either American Indian or Latino history I have seen for some time. In spite of the title, Meeks largely does not give us a broad survey of the experiences of all Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona, but focuses on those instances where the racial definitions as they relate to citizenship were being contested. He especially focuses on the Yaqui and O’odham peoples. This is welcome. While the Yaqui do not suffer from a lack of study, the O’odham definitely do. The deficiency is so great that most of the students whom I taught at Arizona State University had never heard of the O’odham, in spite of many growing up in the same metro area as the Ak Chin and Salt River reservations. Meeks details how, as Arizona fell under U.S. control following the war with Mexico and the Gadsden Purchase, incoming Anglos imposed a racial definition for citizenship. In the debates over statehood, Anglo Arizonans faced an obstacle in the belief held by many whites outside the region that Arizona Territory had too many Mexicans and Indians to be allowed to become a state. White Arizonans reacted by emphasizing their standards of what they perceived western civilization to be, and forced both Mexicans and Indians to live up to racialized definitions, which affected citizenship, language, and even agriculture. European Americans were at the same time also arguing amongst themselves defining what “white” meant, since many eastern and southern European immigrants themselves faced suspicions from the more established descendants of European immigrants from northern and western Europe. Both the O’odham and the Yaqui were seen as more agricultural and sedentary , thus more allegedly civilized by white standards. Yaquis, as simultaneously indigenous and immigrants from Mexico, challenged Anglo notions of “Indian” and in turn even debated amongst themselves whether they were more Mexican than Indian, or some combination of the two. The border had split the O’odham nation. Later the BIA imposed a tribal government that replaced village councils of male elders, causing many O’odham to redefine themselves more as a nation than as members of autonomous villages. State authorities even used a racial basis for decisions governing water use, diverting water from O’odham lands, forcing them to shift from subsistence agriculture to wage labor and seasonal migrant farm work. Intermarriage and the adoption of many Mexican customs by both O’odham and Yaqui, such as the Catholic faith, compadrazgo (godparenting ), and devotion to patron saints and festival days led many whites to argue as recently as the 1980s that Yaquis were not truly Indian. The place of Mexicans and the choice made by Mexican/Hispano leaders to claim to be white has already been covered extensively in other works, as has a growing body of literature studying whiteness. Wisely, Meeks chooses to limit the focus solely to Arizonans’ interactions with the groups whose racial categories were the most under dispute. One of the questions I would have liked answered 2009 Book Reviews 335 *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 335 was the place of the Cocopah during these struggles, another Native people split by the border. But this is an extremely minor quibble. Meeks’s work is a welcome study of how Natives, Latinos, and whites come to be viewed as such, a useful work for anyone in multicultural studies, critical race theory, or southwestern history. Alamo Community College District Al Carroll Iron Horse Imperialism: The Southern Pacific of Mexico, 1880–1951. By Daniel Lewis. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007. Pp. 196. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 0-81652-604-4. $35.00, cloth.) This well-researched book makes use of previously untapped archival material to offer a detailed picture of the day-to-day operations of the Southern Pacific of Mexico, as well as insight into the interactions between United States companies...

After the ball is over: commentary on the SAHRC inquiry

At some stage in this I must confront two things. Firstly, Arendt's distinction between 'race thinking' and 'racism'; and secondly, the shift from creationist to evolutionary thinking in the understanding of the marker 'race'. In the latter it becomes important to distinguish between that which exists as part of a creator's design, and that which has some aspect of the hoary old 'hopeful monster' thesis. Thus the motivations behind Saartjie Baartman before evolution, and the Gypsies and Jews of the Holocaust afterwards, are not the same. Baartman was a case of seeking to justify difference on the basis of created species, the Holocaust frequently invoked failed or faulty evolution. Was Darwinism (the ideology) a marker point in the shift from race thinking to racism? I think Arendt may have some clues! In introducing the Rhodes Journalism Review (RJR) theme issue (August 2000) on the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) inquiry into racism in the media, Commission chair Barney Pityana notes that '... the inquiry was about racism, and not so much about freedom of expression. Much of the commentary and controversy leading to the public hearings had conveniently avoided this matter' (Pityana 2000). Clearly, one could easily dismiss this as a species of formalistic hairsplitting, designed to differentiate between expression and the attitudes that ground that expression. Whether these two concepts are distinct, continuous or identical, is a philosophical and not a legal issue. And in any case, I am not going to make the same kind of argument Pityana claims the newspapers made, because like him I don't think that freedom of expression was the issue anyway. However, I intend to examine the question of why the commission declined to offer at least some working definition of racism in its terms of reference. Pityana (2000) justifies this decision on the grounds that 'the Commission did not want to start with definitions, but sought to examine the narratives of race that were communicated to the South African media reading, listening and viewing public'. Many commentators felt, rightly, that in the absence of some marker or criterion that distinguished racism from other possibilities--like, say, poor training, slipshod practice, or inadequate ethical oversight--it would be possible for the commission to come to quite arbitrary decisions about what in fact constituted racist media reporting. As the response to the Interim report showed, especially with respect to the cultural studies-derived 'analysis' by Claudia Braude, many in the media felt that this is exactly what transpired. However, what seems missing from both the responses and the commission's reports (interim and final) is just what constitutes 'race' as a conception that grounds some kind of action (or its justification or motivation) as 'racist'. In the commission chair's own words, the inquiry was seeking to 'examine the narratives of race' that may have been communicated in the media. Clearly, even if this justification seems to many to have appeared after the fact, Pityana has a point in the sense that there has to be some conception of race present before any individual, group or society can institute racism as a practice or means of identification. In this regard, then, I read the commission as being alive to the distinction between race-thinking and racism, that Hannah Arendt drew half-a-century ago (Arendt 1951). If this is the case, however, then both the interim and final reports are open to the accusation (not necessarily a fair one) that those who produced them have lost sight of the historical and political specificity of particular instances of racism. I will not go into this issue, but instead I will try to make amends for the aporia arising from the commission's failure to confront the reality of race in its terms of reference--and in the responses to and discussion about the commission and its reports. …

The Persistence and Mutation of Racism

PLEASE NOTE: I was involved in the drafting of this paper, but am not claiming it as my own; it was published by the International Council on Human Rights Policy, ICHRP, in English, French and Spanish. The following abstract is an edited text from the Preface to the paper by Robert Archer, then Executive Director of the ICHRP: This paper provides a brief survey of some of the main issues that currently preoccupy people who suffer from racial discrimination or who study its effects. It looks at racism as an international phenomenon, because in one form or another it is to be found in almost every society on earth. It is deeply associated with certain forms of entrenched poverty and certain kinds of violence. No subject is rawer for those who suffer it, precisely because it is a denial of human relationship. Yet it is a feature of racism that, though widespread, for many people it remains unseen. When it is not physically violent, those who do not experience it often fail to understand how profoundly offensive it is. The paper tries to show how persistent racism is, and how it mutates to re-appear in different contexts. The paper is limited. For instance, there is no full agreement about the definition of racism and we did not try to find one; our aim was merely to identify a range of issues for debate. For similar reasons, this document does not take adequate account of history. Numerous issues of substance arise here too, but such complex historical questions can unfortunately also not be addressed in so short a paper. Finally, this document does not describe what it is to experience racism and racial discrimination. Perhaps only literature can do this adequately. As Rober Archer put it: If this paper helps in any way to sharpen our awareness of the numerous and also subtle forms that racism and racial discrimination take in our societies, it will have served its purpose.

Third Way anti-racism: A contextual constructionist approach

Recent debate surrounding racism and immigration in the UK reveals that anti-racist policy is being constructed within a ‘Third Way’ political agenda such that the definition of racism comes to signify a phenomenon considered detrimental to the ‘building of community’. Given the controversial role of the British state in perpetuating the ‘immigration/race-relations problematic’, this paper argues that New Labour's approach to racism comes to embody a set of contradictory assumptions fostered in previous administrations while incorporating elements significant to ‘Third Way’ governance. Crucial to current policy prescription is the reconstitution of the subject of racism, such that both perpetrator and target are viewed through the policy lens of emotional governance. In short, the contemporary anti-racist state seeks to foster legitimacy via an appeal to an emotionalized subjective condition, so that policy defines racism according to the needs of state. Consequently, current ‘race-relations’ policy is an intervention which redefines racist causation while reinforcing state authority.

Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks on Race Consciousness

When the issue of race is approached one is either for retaining race consciousness or for working toward its abolition. There are various ways people choose to retain racial categories and various definitions and meanings of race. As well, abolitionists take on a range of stances on when and how to eliminate racial categories. Nonetheless, that one must take a stance and advocate either retention or abolition seems to be required when studying race theory or discussing racial identities in terms of questions of justice. These two positions are understood as contradictory as well as the only two options available. Using Fanon, and debates surrounding White Skin, Black Masks on this very question of race consciousness, this paper argues against expecting or requiring a clear stance on the issue or even posing it as a dilemma. Reading Fanon as employing an existential phenomenological methodology allows us to see how he exposes injustice by writing about experience and projecting a future shared community of hope and freedom without clear indication of the role our group identities might play. The paper will then show the importance of rethinking the question of perpetuating racial categories, particularly through Fanon, by analyzing three potentially liberatory projects, Critical Whiteness Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Development Studies , demonstrating how the endeavors of many practitioners who claim to already know what various identities will (should) or will not (should not) mean for us truncates these projects.

Coloring History and Mixing Race in Levina Urbino's Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage and Louise Heaven's In Bonds

While figure of is writ large in American literature and literary criticism, (1) this essay shares a recognition most recently advanced by William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun: What is remarkable though not always acknowledged ... is fact that majority of beautiful in American novels before 1865 ... do not end up unfulfilled (xliii). Andrews and Kachun note that Metta Victoria Victor's Maum Guinea, H. L. Hosmer's Adela, John T. Trowbridge's Neighbor Jackwood, Mayne Reid's Quadroon, and E. D. E. N. Southworth's Retribution feature mixed-race female characters who, though they must endure a stint in slavery and withstand intimidation by lascivious slave owners and brutal overseers, often than not ... eventually encounter a northerner or a European on whose love they can rely (lxv, n. 45; xliii). While it is still too early to make judgments about the majority--especially given that Andrews and Kachun's own work illustrates that we need to be hesitant about assuming any complete sets--this essay shares sense that mixed-race characters who are not mulattas have been absent from our discussions for too long. (2) This absence is complicated by disproportionately larger presence in our scholarship of archetypal examples of tragic mulatta type in works such as Lydia Maria Child's The Quadroons, William Wells Brown's Clotel, and Elizabeth Livermore's Zoe, even though these works were neither more popular nor exceedingly better than some of novels noted by Andrews and Kachun. reasons for this imbalance are complex and beyond scope of this essay; it may come in part from Child's early imprint on a vast amount of antislavery literature (including Brown's story) and in part from limited senses of racial definition that have dominated much contemporary scholarship. Regardless, dominance of figure of tragic mulatta in our scholarship has limited our consideration of race and racial identity. This imbalance seems to me, for example, to be partially to blame for Lauren Berlant's dismissal of full range of types of political efficacy available to mixed-race characters--a formation scholars such as P. Gabrielle Foreman have challenged when applied to Black women's texts. (3) It has also, among other gaps, led many of us to locate first real resistance to figure of tragic mulatta in works such as Child's Reconstruction-era Romance of Republic and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy. This essay thus begins by acknowledging that there were several early examples of a discourse of mixed-race heroines running counter to figure of tragic mulatta--one in which mixed-race heroine not only avoids a tragic end but actually embraces her genealogy, uses her visual racial indeterminacy to aid nation-building and self-empowerment, and finds fulfillment in a multi-racial family housed within larger Black community. Specifically, I examine two previously unknown mixed-race heroines who are ultimately far from tragic--indeed, who seem almost consciously constructed as revisions to tragic mulatta type. This essay argues that, in different ways, protagonists of both Levina B. Urbino's Sunshine in Palace and Cottage (1854) and Louise Palmer Heaven's In Bonds (published in 1867 under pseudonym Laura Preston) explode many of expectations of tragic mulatta type. Through this work, I hope to begin to re-imagine contours of our sense of mixed-race female character (tragic mulatta and otherwise) in American literature. I focus on a pair of now unknown novels by now relatively unknown authors for a set of reasons. Both were popular in their day: Sunshine went through four editions (under different titles) in six years, and In Bonds, published in both San Francisco and New York, seems to have launched a successful if spotty career. Both have publication circumstances of interest to students of race: publisher of Sunshine's fourth edition (which carried entirely new title Home Angel) was Thayer and Eldridge, who also contracted to publish Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in Life of a Slave Girl before bankruptcy forestalled their doing so; publisher of In Bonds founded Overland Monthly and was a colleague of Mark Twain (who would, of course, write works key to considerations of race in American literature). …

Measures of redress: Defining disadvantage in a university access programme

Creating alternative avenues to higher education for learners from disadvantaged educational contexts is one of several official redress objectives for South African universities attempting to rectify the injustices of apartheid. Yet how disadvantage is to be defined in a nation characterised by profound economic inequalities and the legacy of racialised political domination is not straightforward. This article presents a case study that documents the effects of two definitions of disadvantage — one racial, the other economic — informing the admissions policies of a university access programme operational on two campuses. It compares respective student cohorts by three sets of variables affecting access to higher education: educational background, household resources, and personal difficulties experienced during the matric year. The study suggests that economic and racial definitions of disadvantage produce student profiles with different levels of educational and socio-economic disadvantage, yet parallels in the frequencies of personal difficulties reported by respective groups suggests that new conceptions of disadvantage (accounting for the effects of HIV/AIDS on schooling) merit further investigation. I argue that targeted disadvantaged populations for access to higher education should be identified without evoking and entrenching the anachronistic language of race.

A systematic review of empirical research on self-reported racism and health

This paper reviews 138 empirical quantitative population-based studies of self-reported racism and health. These studies show an association between self-reported racism and ill health for oppressed racial groups after adjustment for a range of confounders. The strongest and most consistent findings are for negative mental health outcomes and health-related behaviours, with weaker associations existing for positive mental health outcomes, self-assessed health status, and physical health outcomes. Most studies in this emerging field have been published in the past 5 years and have been limited by a dearth of cohort studies, a lack of psychometrically validated exposure instruments, poor conceptualization and definition of racism, conflation of racism with stress, and debate about the aetiologically relevant period for self-reported racism. Future research should examine the psychometric validity of racism instruments and include these instruments, along with objectively measured health outcomes, in existing large-scale survey vehicles as well as longitudinal studies and studies involving children. There is also a need to gain a better understanding of the perception, attribution, and reporting of racism, to investigate the pathways via which self-reported racism affects health, the interplay between mental and physical health outcomes, and exposure to intra-racial, internalized, and systemic racism. Ensuring the quality of studies in this field will allow future research to reveal the complex role that racism plays as a determinant of population health.

Racism: Processes of Detachment, Dehumanization, and Hatred

The author looks at definitions of racism from the viewpoints of various theoretical frameworks, addressing the role of projection and other phenomena. Racism is then examined according to principles of psychoanalytic relational theory, attachment theory, and radical group analytic theory. Power relationships, the psychosocial process, a sense of us versus them, and the universal importance of a feeling of belonging are also taken into consideration. In examining the meaning of race, the author addresses the notions of black and white and their evolution over time, as well as the phenomenon of othering.

Who's Who: Exploring the Discrepancy between the Methods of Defining African Americans and Native Americans

Our society is one of classifications and separations. When it comes to people, the dominant culture has struggled to make sure everyone fits into a specific category. Historically, non-whites have been defined by white culture according to their function in American society.2 The Native American was categorized as a wild animal that could be tamed; the African American was categorized as a draft animal that could be harnessed and put to use.3 While people are no longer classified by the dominant society as one animal or another, classifications persist in our society and, despite holding ourselves out to the rest ofthe world to be a melting pot of cultures and blind to racial differences, these rigid racial definitions persist. Particularly in the case of African Americans and Native Americans, these racial definitions have far reaching effects. But who gets to decide within which racial category an individual falls? How does that person decide who is a member of each racial category and, therefore, the recipient of both the positive and negative consequences that come with being Native American or African American? Is it even possible to determine who's who as far as racial categories are concerned? This comment will explore these questions. It will explore how Native Americans and African Americans have typically been defined in our country.

In Defense of Traditional Stories and Labels

Forums are not for the faint of heart. My critics offer a searching analysis of my approach and arguments. William Novak questions the basic assumptions and methods of my article; indeed, he dismisses it out of hand as a well-known “traditional” story told in an equally traditional “narrative” fashion. Somewhat more graciously, Daniel Rodgers contests the validity of some of its arguments; more fundamentally, he disputes the legitimacy—at least for a “normal” political actor such as Charles Evans Hughes—of an ideological frame of reference. Just tell the (traditional) story, he says; come to grips with the man and forget the labels. For his part, William Forbath largely accepts my conceptualization but disputes my contention that the traditional liberal state died in 1937. Rather, he argues, the post–New Deal American state was deeply informed by Hughes's “lawyerly” brand of “transitional” liberalism, which balanced a “progressive” commitment to reform and administrative state-building with a “classical” regard for dual federalism and the primacy of courts and common law. Finally, Risa Goluboff contests my suggestion, via Hilaire Belloc, that the new constitutional order subordinated individual economic rights to the interests of the national state and the elites that control it. The quest for economic rights remained strong, she suggests, until the onset of the Cold War, which limited the reach of the American welfare state, and theBrowndecision, which gave a racial (and, eventual, gender) definition to liberal reform.

Race, With or Without Color? Reconciling Brazilian Historiography*

This essay analyzes the Brazilian historiographies of race in order to highlight the incongruity in the idea of race as it developed with respect to Brazilians of African descent as compared to other, immigrant, peoples who came to be identified as ‘non-white.’ The roots of this constraint include the means by which flexible understandings of race simultaneously reinforced the interests of disparate groups and the implicit comparison of the Brazilian expericence wtih that of the United States. I contend that separate treatment for racially-defined groups has constrained our understanding of race in Brazil. Brief overviews of the historiographies highlight the intersections in these bodies of research. Considering race historiography in the aggregate, crystallizes the process by which Brazilians have defined white. At the same time, that it also reveals important lacunae in our understanding of the concept of non-white in Brazil. Beyond the implications for our understanding of Brazil, such a re-oriented perspective can help to understand the mechanisms by which racial identity and definition change over time.

CARIBBEAN DREAMS, HAITIAN NIGHTMARES

Trained, as most of us are, to focus on a small corner of the globe during an equally small moment in time, historians too often miss the larger interconnections that help explain regional racial identity and specific types of class formations in the Atlantic world. Denmark Vesey, for example, is too often depicted merely as an “enslaved rebel leader” (despite being free for two decades prior to his execution) rather than a black abolitionist, or a man of the black Atlantic. In the same way, Simón Bolívar is forced into equally simplistic categories. He is a general and a politician, but rarely a resident of Paris at the time of Bonaparte's coronation, or a visitor to Vesey's South Carolina, or a refugee in Haiti. However, in their later years, and especially in the early 1820s, they both thought much about events in Haiti, and their competing views of the black nation say much about the shifting boundaries of race and class in the western Atlantic. Conventional wisdom holds that for much of the late colonial era and early national periods in both North and South America, the connection between race and class can scarcely be overemphasized. Scholars now acknowledge that racial definitions are always being defined and redefined, just as class status is never static. Nothing better illustrates this understanding than the way these two individuals viewed the possibilities, as well as the dangers, inherent in Haiti's destruction of old correlations and new perceptions of class structures. If elite whites regarded Haiti as a terrifying example of a world turned upside down, Vesey evidently regarded the black nation as the sort of country where bright, aggressive, ambitious men like him could prosper and advance in rank. Historians, with a few notable exceptions, have been dismissive and patronizing of post-1804 Haiti, with its governor-generals, emperors, and presidents for life. But as a former resident of Danish St Thomas, French Saint Domingue, and patriarchal South Carolina (and, most likely, as the child of West Africans), Vesey had never actually seen a truly egalitarian society. If the antislavery ever harbored the sort of communalistic ideals that scholars wish to impose upon black abolitionists, there is now no evidence for it. Vesey appeared to care little about the fact that post-Louverture Haiti was both politically undemocratic and class based. With Christophe's eradication of the blancs and the gens de couleur, race was no longer a component in its class structure, except to the extent that the old order's racial structure was turned upside down. For an exceedingly entrepreneurial businessman like Vesey, Boyer's country was not just liberty or a convenient safe haven; it was the very picture of class mobility.

Genome scan of schizophrenia families in a large Veterans Affairs Cooperative Study sample: Evidence for linkage to 18p11.32 and for racial heterogeneity on chromosomes 6 and 14

Genome-wide linkage analyses of schizophrenia have identified several regions that may harbor schizophrenia susceptibility genes but, given the complex etiology of the disorder, it is unlikely that all susceptibility regions have been detected. We report results from a genome scan of 166 schizophrenia families collected through the Department of Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program. Our definition of affection status included schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, depressed type and we defined families as European American (EA) and African American (AA) based on the probands' and parents' races based on data collected by interviewing the probands. We also assessed evidence for racial heterogeneity in the regions most suggestive of linkage. The maximum LOD score across the genome was 2.96 for chromosome 18, at 0.5 cM in the combined race sample. Both racial groups showed LOD scores greater than 1.0 for chromosome 18. The empirical P-value associated with that LOD score is 0.04 assuming a single genome scan for the combined sample with race narrowly defined, and 0.06 for the combined sample allowing for broad and narrow definitions of race. The empirical P-value of observing a LOD score as large as 2.96 in the combined sample, and of at least 1.0 in each racial group, allowing for narrow and broad racial definitions, is 0.04. Evidence for the second and third largest linkage signals come solely from the AA sample on chromosomes 6 (LOD = 2.11 at 33.2 cM) and 14 (LOD = 2.13 at 51.0). The linkage evidence differed between the AA and EA samples (chromosome 6 P-value = 0.007 and chromosome 14 P-value = 0.004).

The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (review)

Reviewed by: The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity Brent D. Shaw The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. By Benjamin Isaac. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. xiv + 563 pp. $45.00 (cloth). Given the intrinsic historical importance of the idea of racism and its virulent Nachleben in European and world history, it is surprising that this is the first serious scholarly work to confront the problem of race and racism in Greco-Roman antiquity. The author rightly rejects the few existing works—for example those by Nicholas Sherwin-White, Racial Prejudice in Imperial Rome (Cambridge, 1967), and Yves Dauge, Le Barbare: Recherches sur la conception romaine de la barbarie et de la civilisation (Brussels, 1981)—as having little that is worthwhile to contribute to an understanding of the problem. There have been, it is true, a host of recent works in ancient history on the modish subject of ethnicity. But Isaac's work is not another discourse on difference. It is, as he puts it, a history of hate (p. 50). He argues that most modern work on race, even by eminent scholars such as George Fredrickson and Michael Banton, has labored under the combined misconceptions of modernizing definitions of race and a faulty knowledge of the ancient evidence on racism. Isaac therefore begins his investigation with a lengthy introduction in which he attempts to formulate definitions that clearly separate "race" and "racism" from other kinds of classifications of human groups, like popular prejudices, cultural biases, and ethnic stereotyping. Isaac contends—correctly in this reviewer's opinion—that racism was not a creation of the nineteenth century. Some, of course, have ventured earlier dates. In his famous lectures on race at the College de [End Page 227] France in 1976, Foucault thought that the origins of racial consciousness could be traced back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Il faut défendre la société [Paris, 1997], pp. 57–74). It is nevertheless true that the words "race," "racialism," and "racism" did not occur with their modern meanings in English until the first decades of the twentieth century (p. 25). It is also true that the "factual" underpinnings of race were newly scientized in the nineteenth century, especially by the science of biology. But it is equally true that concepts fundamental to race and racism had a long prehistory before this most recent modern phase in their existence. The views of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza in The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, 1994) therefore seem close to Isaac's views on the subject: "Racism has existed from time immemorial, but only in the nineteenth century were there attempts to justify it on the basis of scientific arguments" (p. 36, n. 84). Close, but not quite, since Isaac persuasively argues that scientific ideas were already being deployed to underpin concepts of race in Greco-Roman antiquity. He further argues, as the title of his work indicates, that there was a specific point in time when the components necessary to the creation of a coherent ideology of race came together. Racism therefore did not exist "from time immemorial." It was invented in the context of the Greek city-state. Having made these gains, however, the author perhaps concedes too much to the skeptics by allowing that ancient racism might only be a "proto-racism" (pp. 2, 36, and passim). His arguments and the evidence point in the opposite direction: both sustain the presence of strong concepts of race and racism in antiquity. What happened in the most recent phase of their development was their legitimation in modern scientific, usually biological, modes. Isaac, indeed, criticizes most current social scientific definitions of race as constructed too narrowly in a way that conveniently suits modern circumstances alone, thereby creating a self-fulfilling field of what can and cannot be counted as "race" and "racism" (pp. 17–21). Because of excessive emphasis on biological elements or because they are far too devoted to a single case (the American) and its set of factors (distinctive somatic appearance, skin color), modern definitions simply mirror the world that they are attempting to analyze. Isaac's own definition of racism (pp. 34–35) is sufficiently specific...

MICHEL FOUCAULT OG RACISMENS IDÉHISTORIE

Knowledge, power and subjectification are often considered to be the main themes in the writings of Michel Foucault. The reflections on racism, in comparison, play a less significant role in his work. Foucault's considerations about racism are nonetheless worth highlighting, as they are marked by a rare originality and a will to contest more traditional perspectives on the history of European racism. The article outlines Foucault's notion of racism and argues that one of its important features is the definition of racism as a specific historical function of power. This conception of racism as a function of power encompasses a suggestive but still unexplored analytical potential for a critical reflection on the history of European racism.

In Passing: Arab American Poetry and the Politics of Race

Racial passing has a long history in America. In fact, there are manifold reasons for passing, not the least of which is to reap benefits-social, economic and legal-routinely denied to people of color. Passing is conventionally understood to be a volitional act that either situationally or permanently allows members of marginalized groups to assimilate into a privileged culture. While it could be argued that those who choose to pass are, in a sense, race traitors, betraying familial, historical and cultural ties to personhood,1 Wald provides another way of reading passing, or “crossing the line,” as a “practice that emerges from subjects' desires to control the terms of their racial definition, rather than be subject to the definitions of white supremacy” (6). She further contends that racial distinction, itself, “is a basis of racial oppression and exploitation” (6).

Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire (review)

Reviewed by: Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire Kristin Bluemel Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire. Phyllis Lassner. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Pp. viii + 241. $62.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). There are many stories that could be told about colonial British women writers, but the one we hear these days is that they were invariably agents of empire, either wilting victims, forced by fathers or husbands to leave behind the manicured greens of Tunbridge Wells, or villainous conquerors, heartlessly loading their Liberty chintzes onto tubercular "coolies." Seen as advancing their creative careers by appropriating native voices and experiences, they stand accused by contemporary critics of false consciousness at best, outright imperialist exploitation at worst. It is impossible to believe this simplistic story after reading Phyllis Lassner's Colonial Strangers, which performs the much-needed work of "reality testing" narratives about the end of Empire that have consigned colonial British women writers to a single, predictable spot on our literary historical maps. Throwing down a critical-theoretical gauntlet before the scholars who make these maps, Lassner's revisionary postcolonial critique challenges what we think we know about [End Page 186] relations between colonizing and colonized people, colonial and postcolonial eras. Relentlessly reading history into literature, she finds the stereotype of the memsahib writer unable to account for the complexities of late colonial women writers' literature, politics, and identities. This is in large part because many of these women were prepared to explore in their fictions and memoirs the costs of Britain's ideology of racial supremacy through their witnessing of the rise and fall of the twentieth century's most malignant imperial power, the Third Reich. The literary results of their urgent response to Hitler's quest for world dominance and the Nazi policies and practices of racial definition, enslavement, and extermination that supported it, form a crucial but until now unexplored bridge between colonial and postcolonial literatures, discourses, and theories. Lassner leads us over this bridge, insisting on what should be obvious: that World War II should be included in our accounts of the end of Empire. Rather astonishingly, contemporary critics have failed to consider what difference Hitler's racial ideology of Aryan supremacy and ruthless drive towards world conquest had upon colonial and postcolonial literatures of the period. Lassner demonstrates that colonial writers like Olivia Manning and Phyllis Bottome recognize in their fiction what many scholars ignore in their criticism: that if Hitler had extended his imperial reign beyond Europe, all those constructed as "black" by the Nazis would have been subjected to a fate similar to that of Europe's "black" Jews. As Lassner puts it in her passionately argued introduction, "What we learn from the inclusion of the Jew and antisemitism in the writing of British women is that to exclude the Second World War from postcolonial analysis erases categories of race and racism that illuminate colonialism's savagery on any designated Other. Moreover, to exclude the Third Reich from colonial and postcolonial discourses is to forget and ignore that Hitler's racialist policies and practices represent the quintessential endgame of colonial oppression" (5). To demonstrate how inclusion of the Third Reich and the Holocaust reshape our approach toward British colonial literature and postcolonial studies, Lassner focuses on novels, film adaptations, and memoirs that represent four regions of the aging British empire. Her densely argued, deeply researched chapters (the endnotes alone are worth a book review) are organized geographically, beginning with analysis of novels of the Middle East by Manning, Muriel Spark, and Ethel Mannin, moving next to texts about Anglo-India by Rumer Godden and about Kenya by Elspeth Huxley, then on to novels of the Caribbean by Phyllis Shand Allfrey and Bottome, until ending with a brief analysis of Zadie Smith's novel of postcolonial London, the exuberant and wildly popular White Teeth. Without reducing the differences between her primary subjects' histories, politics, or literary forms, Lassner shows how in each case, the British colonial women she features interrogate the myth of British racial superiority and imperial destiny. Far from being imperial apologists fixed within one identity category, they grapple in complex and often...

On the Moral Economy of Racism and Racist Rationalizations in Sport

This article draws on and extends a series of empirical studies into the nature and extent of racism in selected sports and philosophical explorations of certain virtues and vices in sports more generally. In particular, the article explores dispassionately questions of responsibility and culpability for both committed and unacknowledged racism in sports, and critically evaluates sportspersons’ attempts to rationalize it. We argue that it is necessary to examine: some of the underpinning ‘logic’ of empirical and conceptual research; certain unchallenged assumptions about the moral repugnance of racism; and certain undifferentiated moral responses to racisms of lesser and greater viciousness. The aim of this article, then, is to offer a clearer conceptual schema for evaluating beliefs and behaviour in this highly charged arena. We examine critically certain definitions of racism, and evaluate the ethical standing of a range of actions and practices that characteristically fall under the labels ‘racist’ and ‘racism’.

The Joy of Life: The Idyllic in French Art, circa 1900 (review)

Reviewed by: The Joy of Life: The Idyllic in French Art, circa 1900 Ellen McBreen The Joy of Life: The Idyllic in French Art, circa 1900. Margaret Werth. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xviii + 330. $60.00 (cloth). When Paul Signac exhibited his anarchist manifesto In the Time of Harmony (1893-1895), one of the more sensitive criticisms came from Henry van de Velde, a painter who had recently broken ranks with the neo-Impressionist group that Signac now led. As a vision of utopian idyll, van de Velde thought, Harmony missed its ideological mark with bad figuration and ridiculous wardrobe choices that he found "off-putting . . . Such a get-up has nothing to do with the future . . . and is a matter of puritanical anarchism . . . If these figures had been nude, the joy of painting them would have doubled . . . ."1 For van de Velde, clothing marked the momentary fashions and typologies of class too clearly; nude figures might have been able to transcend them entirely. A decade later, his complaint of "puritanical anarchism" would seem to find its response in Henri Matisse's Bonheur de Vivre (1905-1906), a dreamier idyll of languorous nudes far less specified by time, place or politics. But at the 1906 Salon des Indépendants, Matisse's Bonheur unleashed a torrent of critical hostility that made van de Velde's objections seem rather quaint. Sympathetic critics condemned Bonheur as a lifeless theory of painting, while the more belligerent ones recommended Matisse exile himself to the "land of the Bushmen," where he'd surely be "taken for a master."2 For a theme that was, on the surface of things, about humans finding harmony in nature, the idyll certainly generated a great deal of disharmony. Why here and now, in France during the decades before World War I? This is the central question posed by Margaret Werth's ambitious study. The author convincingly demonstrates how representing an imaginary paradise in paint was intimately connected to real, and urgently posed questions of national, social and individual identity. Although she remains tightly focused on just three works of art (Signac's Harmony, Matisse's Bonheur, and Puvis de Chavannes's Summer of 1891), the scope of her inquiry successfully transforms the book into a comprehensive survey of French culture and politics circa 1900. Her first chapter examines Puvis de Chavannes, arguably the most influential painter of idyll in fin-de-siècle France. She begins with a thoughtful account of the layered and complex reception of Puvis's work, demonstrating how images can rarely be secured as ideological texts. Puvis's [End Page 596] Summer, for example, was a banner held high by many different critical camps. In its home in Paris's newly re-constructed Hôtel de Ville, this large-scale decoration served as an affirmative metaphor for a restored and healthy Third Republic. Outside of City Hall, however, right-wing nationalists like Charles Maurras appropriated Puvis because the artist's classically inspired odes to Latin ancestry confirmed their racial definition of "Frenchness." But the artist was also adopted by left-leaning socialists like Jean Jaurès, who saw in Puvis's idyll a progressive paradise where individuals, reconciled with both nature and their past, found refuge in a kind of pre-capitalist collective. In an interpretive move that characterizes Werth's methods throughout, her own analysis gives equal time to the contradictions in Puvis's project, uncovering loss and morbidity beneath his joie de vivre nostalgia. Her prose is especially captivating when describing how Puvis's weirdly inflated figures struggle against their unified ground; how decomposition and distortion threaten the overall decorative synthesis. This kind of dialectical inquiry structures Werth's second chapter on Signac's Harmony, which moves back and forth between the painting's potentials and its aesthetic and critical failures, and more generally, from a consideration of visual utopias against textual ones (e.g.: William Morris's contemporary News from Nowhere). Signac's subtitle, "The golden age is not in the past, it is the future," emphasized how forward-looking his vision of society was meant to be, as a place where man and woman, artist and...