Racial Distinctions Research Articles

Between political emancipation and creole hegemony: Viscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans (c. 1791)

ABSTRACTViscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans inaugurates a tradition of nonconformist political writing against Spanish colonial rule during the second half of the eighteenth century, a period characterized by the Crown’s attempt to reorganize several aspects of the colonial administration. As an ex-Jesuit living in exile after the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from all Spanish territories in 1767, Viscardo had a political as much as a personal motive in designing a project that would cut the colonial ties between Spain and the New World. His plans for emancipation included the instauration of a monarchical form of government, but his design was out of touch with reality and would have hardly been taken seriously by the inhabitants had a British-backed expeditionary force reached the coasts of Chile and Peru, as he had planned. While Viscardo’s Letter may have stirred a sense of creole patriotism some years after his death, the political scruples of the ancien regime based on social privileges and racial distinctions were too strong to be dismantled by mere ideals of freedom, justice and equality. Thus, effective political participation was restricted to the creole elite, whom Viscardo saw as the legitimate guarantor of social order and economic prosperity.

Transnational Settler Colonial Formations and Global Capital: A Consideration of Indigenous Mexican Migrants

Transnational Settler Colonial Formations and Global Capital: A Consideration of Indigenous Mexican Migrants Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera (bio) and Korinta Maldonado (bio) The Los Angeles Central Library’s exhibition “Visualizing Language: A Zapotec Worldview,” which opened this past September, features a series of murals produced by the Oaxacan artists collective Tlacolulokos. The murals are envisioned as providing a “counter-narrative” to existing ones painted by Dean Cornwell, in 1933, depicting a history of California in four stages: Era of Discovery, Missions, Americanization, and Founding of the City of Los Angeles.1 In these paintings Native people are depicted as marginal and subservient figures within grander visions of colonization. The new murals are thus intended to provide a new voice by putting “a different protagonist in the center of the story.”2 What is of interest for the present essay is who gets to tell this story. It is not Native artists on whose land the library is built, but Oaxacan Indigenous people. In this way, this project continues a legacy of erasure embedded in current discourses of multiculturalism that reinforce settler colonial dispossession and hegemony.3 Taking Indigenous Mexican migration as a point of departure, this essay joins critical scholarship on settler colonialism exploring the role of the migrant in settler processes. Following Patrick Wolfe’s theorization of settler colonialism as a structuring force rather than as a historical passage,4 we ask: How might a comparative framework on settler colonialisms help us articulate theoretical discussion beyond the dominant settler–Native racial binary? And in which ways does the settler colonial theoretical framework render visible the ways in which distinct bodies are racialized within and beyond national boundaries? We understand settler colonialism as the complex reverberations originating from Indigenous dispossession and white possession.5 As a global and transnational phenomenon,6 settler colonialism is a structuring force that in coproduction with the transatlantic slave trade, indentured labor, and other forms of racial [End Page 809] ordering enables particular racial logics and forms of exclusions integral to global capital and empire.7 We also examine settler colonialism within a relational framework promoted by Indigenous and Indigenous studies scholars. A comparative perspective provides synergistic opportunities to compare histories of dispossession and racialization between US and Mexican native populations while recognizing differing colonial experiences. A relational framework examines specific contingencies and conditions of settler colonial contexts to avoid a flattening of distinct historical trajectories that are contained within differences. Thus we place settler colonialism in relation to other imperial formations that allow us to better understand how Indigenous migrants move among distinct race, class, gender, and other colonial formations, as Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein have argued.8 Our consideration of settler colonialism expands beyond Latinx or Chicanx contexts by destabilizing hegemonic categories that draw on national or racial distinctions and erase Indigenous peoples’ experiences.9 Despite constitutional reforms recognizing Mexico’s plural composition, Indigenous peoples in Mexico are subjected to racism, oppression, and dispossession, much like Native Americans in the United States. The multicultural shift in Mexico has served as a governance strategy10 that aims to control and disable radical politics by creating legal frameworks of “conditional inclusion”11 while erasing Indigenous peoples’ demands for autonomy and self-determination. Ultimately these policies further promote Indigenous migration. Through a comparative analysis of settler colonialism in the context of Mexican Indigenous migration to California and Washington, we demonstrate distinct ways in which Indigenous migrants mobilize and articulate their indigeneity. We argue that Indigenous migrant forms of engagement are framed by the particular settler logics and imperial formations in which they find themselves. We show that settler colonialism is contingent and historical. Further, we examine how Los Angeles becomes a site where logics of erasure stand out, while in Yakima connections and relationality that move us beyond settler–colonial binaries prevail. By looking at the case of Zapotecs in a dense urban environment inhabited by many Indigenous bodies, we propose that Natives become invisible at different places and historical moments, whereas in the Yakima valley a rural context renders Indigenous recognition more visible. [End Page 810] Indigenous Mexicans in the United States Until recently, we have tended to think of...

Introduction: Expand or Die: The Revolution's New Empire

The William and Mary Quarterly and Journal of the Early Republic's joint issue centers on a theme, "Writing To and From the Revolution," that invites consideration of the revolution's transformative impact. On balance, this introduction argues, the issue's articles emphasize continuities over change. A focus on the fallout from a long-lasting civil war, American revolutionary leaders' efforts to raise funds via western land sales, Indian resistance, and the challenges presented by western settlers offers another perspective. The American Revolution promoted the linkage of three increasingly interdependent social processes: first, the hardening of racial distinctions to associate freedom with whiteness; second, the regularization of state formation to balance the interests of older states with the longing of new state elites for secure private property in land and slaves; and third, the escalation of westward expansion to relieve social tensions and reduce taxes in the eastern polities. The beneficiaries celebrated the results as freedom and prosperity, which they considered the republican fruits of their revolution. But that success contained contradictions that would provoke a new civil war, even bloodier and more destructive than the revolution.

ReedvTown of Gilbert, Arizona, and the Rise of the Anticlassificatory First Amendment

The distinction between content-based and content-neutral regulations of speech is one of the most important in First Amendment law. Despite its importance, however, the Court has had trouble defining what it means for a law to be content-based. Instead, for over thirty years, the Court has vacillated between two definitions. In one line of cases, the Court has insisted that laws are content-based whenever they make content distinctions on their face. In another line of cases, the Court has instead insisted that laws are content-based only when they cannot be justified by a content-neutral purpose. The result has been the creation of a very complicated, often incoherent, body of law. Two terms ago, in Reed v. Town of Gilbert, Arizona, the Court attempted to bring some clarity to this messy area of First Amendment jurisprudence when it held that laws that employ content distinctions are always content-based, regardless of the purposes they serve. The decision gives lower courts what they have long been missing: clear guidance on what to do when faced with an allegedly discriminatory speech regulation. But it also makes it considerably harder to defend laws that make facial content distinctions against constitutional challenge than was true in the past. Reed thus represents a significant, deregulatory shift in First Amendment doctrine. This Article explores this shift and its normative implications. It does so by means of an analogy to the Court’s equal protection jurisprudence, and specifically its case law dealing with race discrimination. As the Article demonstrates, the shift that Reed enacts in First Amendment law resembles in many respects the shift that occurred several decades ago in equal protection law, when the Court squarely embraced what scholars have described as an anti-classificatory test of race discrimination and insisted that all laws that employ racial distinctions are presumptively invalid, no matter the purposes the government invokes to justify them. Reed similarly insists that all laws that employ content distinctions are presumptively invalid, no matter the purposes the government invokes to justify them. It announces what we might call an anti-classificatory test of content discrimination. The Article argues that, whatever the merits of an anti-classificatory approach in the equal protection context, such an approach is singularly inappropriate in First Amendment cases, at least those dealing with non-viewpoint based laws. This is because laws that make content distinctions play a pervasive, even important, role in the regulation of both public and private life. A rule that treats as presumptively unconstitutional all facially content-based laws therefore threatens to invalidate many entirely constitutional laws. It imposes significant costs on the regulatory power of the government—costs that can only be justified if there is no less costly means of protecting speakers against discriminatory state actions. As this Article shows, there are in fact less costly alternatives to the test of content-based lawmaking that Reed announced.

Runaways, Refugees, and Race in the Revolutionary Era

Runaways, Refugees, and Race in the Revolutionary Era Kelly Kennington Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans. By K ennethR. A slakson. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 261 pages. Cloth, ebook. Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts. By E milyB lanck. Studies in the Legal History of the South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014. 235 pages. Cloth. A recent wave of new scholarship investigates the intersection of slavery and law in early American history. Although the particular focus on slavery and law emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century, the twenty-first century has produced an embarrassment of rich new works tackling challenging questions in the field: Who makes law? Whose voices mattered to courts, legislators, and the wider legal community? A related set of inquiries asks how enslaved individuals interacted with and experienced the legal system. What kinds of legal cases involved people of African descent, and how did these cases shape broader legal doctrines? 1A multitude of voices contributed to the development of a law of slavery throughout early America, and, as these two books attest, the efforts of enslaved and free people of African descent were essential to the story. In addition to recognizing the importance of enslaved and free people of African descent to legal history, both of these books wrestle with the topic of comity—how courts in one jurisdiction chose to treat the laws of other jurisdictions. For example, how did slave and free states (or nations) [End Page 333]handle legal conflict that arose in their courts? Emily Blanck's work traces how Massachusetts and South Carolina interacted in the years after the Tyrannicideaffair, a dispute over the status of thirty-four enslaved Africans from South Carolina who arrived in Massachusetts after their capture from a British ship, while Kenneth R. Aslakson's book discusses how the migration of refugees from Saint Domingue influenced the role of Louisiana's courts in making racial distinctions. In the era of the American Revolution and the first decades of the United States, concerns over how states and nations worked together and respected each other's laws were central to the larger project of nation building and lawmaking. Blanck's Tyrannicideis a short, readable account of the conflict between South Carolina and Massachusetts over the fate of thirty-four enslaved Africans from the Waccamaw Peninsula of South Carolina. Some of these individuals might have fled their enslavement in late April/early May 1779 and others may have fallen victim to British privateers, but the group ended up on an unnamed British vessel. The details of their initial capture are unknown and, as Blanck argues, might be different for each of the enslaved individuals. The group eventually reached a British ship off the coast of South Carolina, and, after two attacks by privateers, the Massachusetts brig Tyrannicidebrought the enslaved prisoners to Boston Harbor on June 16, 1779. In Blanck's telling, Massachusetts officials "chose to reject the idea that they were property and recognized their humanity and the choices they made" (81) when the captives requested to be sent home to slavery in South Carolina. Blanck explains this decision by suggesting that the enslaved captives were "no doubt exhausted by the perils of life on a privateer" (81). Although twenty of the individuals left shortly after their arrival, the crux of the conflict between the two states concerned the fourteen enslaved people who stayed in Boston for a prolonged period after their owners were delayed in retrieving them. Once this group integrated into the local black community of Boston, they resisted efforts by their former owners to return them to slavery. The resulting conflict set off a flurry of letters between the states' governors and, as Blanck argues, contributed to broader debates over fugitive slaves in the era before the U.S. Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause. Blanck argues that variations in the states' historical experiences with slavery—rather than fundamental ideological differences—are what caused Massachusetts and South Carolina to oppose each other during the constitutional debates. In four chronological chapters...

Algumas notas sobre bonecas para mulheres "negras" em Maputo

Resumo: Este artigo busca pensar o lugar que as bonecas ocupam na formação da subjetividade de mulheres "negras" moçambicanas. Tendo em vista que a indústria de brinquedos opta pela superprodução de bonecas "brancas" e loiras para crianças de vários pertencimentos "étnicos", paramos para refletir sobre as seguintes questões: que lugares as bonecas ocupam na vida de uma criança? De que forma elas operam na maneira como as meninas se relacionam com os próprios corpos e com seus cabelos? Quais as implicações para uma menina negra que tem somente bonecas loiras disponíveis para brincar? Seria esse brinquedo também um objeto de criação de distinção racial? Farei uma reflexão da infância a partir das experiências rememoradas de mulheres adultas. Trata-se, portanto, de um olhar em retrospectiva feito por meio de relatos e reminiscências de mulheres que já brincaram com bonecas.

‘This big bum thing has taken over the world’: Considering black women’s changing views on body image and the role of celebrity

Abstract Based on a small-scale project that explores racial distinctions in women’s attitudes towards weight loss and dieting, this article considers black women’s changing understandings of beauty and body image, and in particular young black women’s desire for a ‘slim-thick’ look. This is a body shape that brings together aspects of black and white beauty, seen to be embodied by Kim Kardashian, due to her full-figured bottom and thighs, and her very petite waist. The article argues that Kim Kardashian has been an important influence in shaping young women’s notions of attractiveness, by encouraging a common concept of body image and desirability across racial groups. Indeed, operating as an ‘exotic other’, who sits somewhere between black and white beauty, Kim Kardashian and the ‘slim-thick’ ideal perhaps offer an example of cultural assimilation, and yet they also work to exaggerate cultural stereotypes, encouraging a notion of beauty that is unrealistic, and far outside the reach of ordinary women.

The Extremities of Racial Meaning

The Extremities of Racial Meaning

Этнополитическая конфликтность и политика идентичности в странах Латинской Америки

Application of spatial-organizational approach in analysis of ethno-political conflict and identity politics in divided, plural, multiethnic and multiracial hybrid Latin American societies allows to consider ethno-political conflict as a multidimensional and multifaceted phenomenon, as well as to analyze identity politics as one of the priority areas of public domain in the context of globalization, struggle for global collective leadership of Latin America states and for global competitiveness. The Latin American political elites have been actively promoting racial mixing, mythologized ideas of national (civic) unity, racial and ethnic homogeneity, and preferred to prevent ethnic and racial distinctions from appearing in the political discourse and in the official documents. However, the problems of race and ethnicity are still present in the national discourse and in the regional politics. The analysis conducted in the categories of political space of various components of ethno-political conflict in the specific socio-cultural and historical conditions of Latin America allowed to identify the general and the particular in the processes of transformation of models of state-territorial structure of the region in the past three decades and in historical perspective, to classify internal and external factors of the development of various transnational political spaces that can alter the established political identities, as well as to promote the formation of new macro-political communities, to comprehend the undergoing processes of decentralization and federalization in many Latin American countries, aimed at strengthening civic nationalism in the context of regionalization on the American continent in general, change in configuration of the modern world order, to evaluate the experience of regional policy in these countries.

Planters, Eskimos, and Indians: Race and the Organization of Trade under the Hudson’s Bay Company in Labrador, 1830–50

Focusing on the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) 1830–50, this paper examines the unsettling and reconstitution of racial categories in Labrador. It argues that in Labrador these categories reflected the particular class-based logic that emerged as the company sought to assert itself in this region in the face of resistance to encroachment. In particular, in this setting, social categories were tied to access to the distribution of credit in the prevailing system of merchant capitalism (“truck”) in the region. And, while understanding the foundations of colonial categories in Labrador is obviously important for grasping the history of this locale, the centrality of the credit system to racial distinctions in the region also has wider implications for our understanding of nineteenth century colonialism. After all, relations of exchange figured prominently as mechanisms through which Europeans asserted authority over colonial spaces in a wide variety of “contact zones,” especially in the middling years of the nineteenth century. It is likely that the pattern of relations and mode of categorization under the HBC in Labrador had parallels elsewhere.

Differences in childhood physical abuse reporting and the association between CPA and alcohol use disorder in European American and African American women.

The goal of the current study was to examine whether the magnitude of the association between childhood physical abuse (CPA) and alcohol use disorder (AUD) varies by type of CPA assessment and race of the respondents. Data are from the Missouri adolescent female twins study and the Missouri family study (N = 4508) where 21.2% identified as African American (AA) and 78.8% as European American (EA); mean age = 23.8. Data were collected using a structured comprehensive interview which assessed CPA experiences using behavioral questions about specific abusive behaviors and trauma checklist items. Cox proportional hazards regression analyses were conducted, adjusting for additional risk factors associated with AUD, including co-occurring psychiatric disorders (defined as time-varying) and parental alcohol misuse. Overall, CPA reporting patterns were highly correlated (tetrachoric ρ = 0.73); although, only 25.8% of women who endorsed behaviorally defined CPA also endorsed checklist items whereas 72.2% of women who endorsed checklist items also endorsed behavioral questions. Racial disparities were evident, with behaviorally defined CPA increasing the hazard for AUD in EA but not AA women. Additional racial disparities in the risk for AUD were observed: increased hazard for AUD were associated with major depressive disorder in AA, and cannabis dependence and paternal alcohol problems in EA, women. Results demonstrate the relevance of the type of CPA measure in assessing CPA in studies of alcohol-related problems-behavioral items may be more inclusive of CPA exposure and more predictive of AUD- and highlight racial distinctions of AUD etiology in women. (PsycINFO Database Record

‘To what world am I being released to?’: Canadian national news discourse and the anticipated repatriation of Omar Khadr

ABSTRACTBetween January 2010 and September 2012, Canadians anticipated the possible return of a citizen incarcerated in Guantánamo for approximately a decade. This temporal moment incited narratives about Canadian citizenship and belonging. Narratives, I argue, that are discursively mediated through (and anchored in) the figure of the White Canadian. Khadr’s potential return to Canada is expressed as a perilous racial encounter between white nationals and a foreign racial body. To bring to life this encounter, I draw on three expressions of fear in Canadian national news media. I first trace how narratives of descent, evident in discussions of Khadr’s family and its history, reinforce distinctions between authentic and inauthentic Canadians. Second, I consider how Khadr’s failure to incarnate Canadian values re-produces whiteness and rationality as qualifiers of national membership and belonging. Lastly, I demonstrate how the putatively contagious nature of the Muslim terrorist psyche valorizes racial distinctions between Canadians and Muslims. My work aims to make visible the ideological labor of national news discourse. I think through these representations within the racial politics which structure citizenship and negotiations about what it means to be Canadian.

Envisioning the United States in the Latin American myth of ‘racial democracy mestizaje’

ABSTRACTTransnational comparison is relevant both to how racial hierarchy is obscured and elucidated. This Essay traces how the Latin American ‘racial democracy mestizaje’ depiction of the US as blind to racial mixture and color distinctions mistakenly misrepresent the Southern Jim Crow history as the only US experience of racism. It suggests that, in turn, such a limited frame for comparison cloaks not only the more extensive terrain of racism in the United States that is separate from the Jim Crow reality but also parallels to the Latin American context. Moreover, the circumscribed view of US racism adversely affects those who critique the ‘racial democracy mestizaje’ myth of Latin American post racialism. This is because the standard Latin American story of US racial history hinders the ability to fully countermand the attack that portrays racial justice activists as inappropriately applying overly restrictive US binary perspectives on race. With the fuller explication of the complete US racial history, and its contemporary manifestations, it will not be so easy to dismiss the comparisons of racial subordination across the Americas, as the imperialist imposition of ill-fitting US notions of race.

Non-racism as a core value in bioethics

Summary In this article, non-racism as a core value in bioethics is analysed. It is striking that both the rise of bioethics in the USA in the post-World War 2 environment, as well as in South Africa in the 1980s, were closely associated with racist incidents and reactions to them. In the USA, it was the notorious Tuskegee syphilis trials, and in South Africa, it was the suffering and death of Steve Biko as a result of maltreatment by the security police in collusion with medical professionals. The meanings of key terms such as “value”, “race”, “whiteness”, “racism” and “racialism” are analysed. In particular, the significant way in which the phenomenon of “whiteness” held and still seems to hold sway over the discipline of bioethics, and the dangers involved in that, are discussed, with special reference to the work of Samantha Vice and Catherine Myser. Bioethics as a discipline emanates from the deep seated sense that there is a difference between right and wrong acts, that good can in principle be distinguished from bad, and that this capacity of ours to submit all our acts and judgments to the criterion of obligation reveals the fact that we do not simply understand ourselves as robots functioning according to inexorable natural laws, but that as human beings we confer value on ourselves, on most other living creatures (particularly animals with person-like characteristics like the higher primates) and on the environment in general. What is intolerable is the idea of double or multiple standards of value, based on no more than race, for different groups of humans. It belongs to the essence of the value we confer on ourselves and others that we consider each and every human being as a unique centre of value that demands and justifies respect. Racism is an ideology that, in terms of what it basically propagates, insists on alleged biological differences between groups of people that in one way or another justify the inferior treatment or maltreatment of certain people and groups. Such an ideology violates all the principles of biomedical ethics, in particular the principle of respect for the autonomy of people. The article is concluded by a discussion of the problem related to the notion of “race” as variable in biomedical research, with special emphasis on the question as to how Research Ethics Committees are to go about dealing with this phenomenon when considering or deliberating about research protocols. In this discussion, the utility of a distinction between “racism” and “racialism” is considered. Many authors argue that this distinction is obscure and, in the end, does not avoid reinforcing racial stereotypes, thus perpetuating the hold that a concept such as “whiteness” has on most societies (as argued earlier). On the other hand, the distinction might be of use or even inevitable for the issue of REC's dealing with race as variable in research. It seems that, for the purposes of certain kinds of biomedical research, the acknowledgement that race does play some part in the spread of a certain condition, and that racial groups therefore require special attention in conceptualising a remedy, seems to be inevitable. In the latter case, it is arguably fairer to claim that the need for a racial distinction in order to do a certain type of biomedical research stems from racialist considerations, and certainly not from racist considerations. Broad and brief guidelines for the work of REC's in dealing with this issue are finally formulated.

Abstract A02: Breast cancer recurrence patterns among ethnically distinct populations: A single institution large cohort study

Abstract African-American (AA) women with breast cancer have worse overall survival compared with European-American (EA) women with breast cancer for reasons that are incompletely understood. A primary risk factor for breast cancer-specific mortality is disease recurrence, yet racial distinctions in recurrence patterns remain poorly characterized. Evaluation of the risk of recurrence upon initial diagnosis is crucial for clinicians to customize an optimal treatment plan. Prognostic factors associated with recurrence include lymph node involvement, larger tumor size, earlier age at diagnosis, and triple-negative receptor status. These poor prognostic indicators have been associated with AA race. In this study, we examined rates and patterns of recurrence in a large cohort of breast cancer patients (n=10504) treated from 2005-2015 at Northside Hospital in Atlanta, GA. We observed that AA breast cancer patients (n=1850) exhibited a higher frequency of recurrences than EA breast cancer patients (n=7931) (p=0.047). Moreover, AA breast cancer patients exhibited a trend towards regional and distant recurrences, which are more fatal, whereas EA breast cancer patients displayed a higher inclination towards local recurrences that show a better prognosis. However, while these trends were robust, they did not achieve significance perhaps owing to the small number of patients in recurrence location subcategories. Importantly, overall survival was worse among AA patients with distant recurrences (n=26) than EA breast cancer patients with distant recurrences (n=80) (p=0.01). Furthermore, among patients who underwent lymph node surgery, regional recurrence was more likely among AAs (n=1030) than EAs (n=5252) (p=0.045). Among patients who received radiation, there was a non-significant trend towards AAs (n=874) exhibiting a greater propensity toward disease recurrence than EAs (n=3734). This study illuminates striking differences in recurrence patterns among AA and EA breast cancer patients by exposing that AA patients are more likely to experience more aggressive non-local recurrences, and are at a greater risk of mortality from distant recurrences. Collectively, these findings help to explain the accelerated progression of the disease and lower survival rates in AA breast cancer patients compared with their EA counterparts, underscoring the urgent need for clinicians to consider race in screening programs and when devising treatment plans. Citation Format: Nikita Wright, Pranay Neema, Remus Osan, Jun Xia, Stephen Wells, Josef G. Venable, Mildred Jones, Padmashree Rida, Ritu Aneja, Guilherme Cantuaria. Breast cancer recurrence patterns among ethnically distinct populations: A single institution large cohort study. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Eighth AACR Conference on The Science of Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; Nov 13-16, 2015; Atlanta, GA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2016;25(3 Suppl):Abstract nr A02.

“Your Own Goddamn Idiom”: Junot Díaz’s Translingualism in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Whilst Bharati Mukherjee has identified Junot Díaz as a new American immigrant writer who refuses to abandon his mother tongue and “pre-migration historical inheritance,” Toni Morrison has argued that language is “the most valuable point of entry into the question of cultural (or racial) distinction.” Considering both the difference between old and new American immigrant writing and the question of cultural and racial distinction in Díaz’s writing, close analysis of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao shows the newness and the political valency of Díaz’s translingualism. It reveals how his narrator Yunior’s oral-sounding discourse is created from high literary techniques and references combined with the “tainted” languages of sci-fi and fantasy, hip hop and Spanishes of the street. It is in this cultural and linguistic miscegenation that Díaz’s originality and radical poetics reside, as they make up an original new-immigrant literary discourse that is distinctly his “own goddamn idiom.”

Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times, Vol. 2, ed. by Beverly Greene Bond and Sarah Wilkerson Freeman

Reviewed by: Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times, Vol. 2, ed. by Beverly Greene Bond and Sarah Wilkerson Freeman Sara Brooks Sundberg Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times. Volume 2. Edited by Beverly Greene Bond and Sarah Wilkerson Freeman. Southern Women: Their Lives and Times. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. [xiv], 425. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-3743-2; cloth, $89.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-3742-5.) In this second volume about Tennessee women in the University of Georgia Press series Southern Women: Their Lives and Times, the editors have selected sixteen essays that examine how Tennessee women not only reflected but also changed their times. Building on the first volume, which included essays on women from as early as the 1700s, this volume is divided equally into two parts focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. African American and white women are examined in essays that explore themes ranging from “the interconnectedness of race, class and gender” to the activism of feminist reformers (p. 2). Some authors highlight individual women’s lives, while others examine the activities and experiences of groups of women. Taken together, the essays represent geographic regions throughout the state, and they expose female perspectives on the history of the state and the nation. Part 1 opens with two essays that focus on two groups of women whose lives are difficult to reconstruct: enslaved women and “common white women in farming households” (p. 36). Both essays glean important information from an array of public documents to highlight, among other topics, the significance of migration and labor in shaping women’s lives. African American women, both slave and free, most often experienced forced migration into Tennessee from North Carolina, and the restrictive laws and regulations governing slavery and racial distinctions reflected those they left behind. Similar to pioneer farm women on other frontiers, white farm women came to Tennessee in search of opportunities that were often balanced against painful separation from their families. Both groups of women made substantial contributions to the economy of the region: enslaved women through plantation production and reproduction, and white farm women through textile production. The Civil War and its aftermath serve as the backdrop for the remaining five essays in Part 1, as the authors explore the many ways Tennessee women participated in the construction of social spaces and historical memory during and after the war. For example, in “‘Graceless Yankee Tramps and Secesh She-Devils’: Union Soldiers and Confederate Women in Middle Tennessee,” Laura Mammina explores interactions between Union soldiers and Confederate women that challenged gentlemanly and ladylike behavior and “called into question traditional notions of masculine and feminine behavior, revealing them to be permeable and ambiguous” (p. 63). In “Forming a ‘Sisterhood Chain’: Women, Emancipation, and Freedom Celebrations in Tennessee,” Antoinette G. van Zelm shows how freedwomen celebrated emancipation publicly alongside freedmen and how their participation in these public events forged an influential sisterhood rooted in “women’s emancipation experiences” (p. 81). Additionally, in “The Right to Be a Lady: Ida B. Wells and Social Reform,” Sarah L. Silkey explains how Wells fought against the marginalization of middle-class African American women by insisting on being seated in the ladies’ car on passenger railways, among other issues. Wells’s claim of respectability challenged segregation of social spaces and [End Page 717] demonstrates the complex intersection of race, class, and gender in turn-of-the-twentieth-century efforts for reform. Part 2 turns the reader’s attention to the twentieth century and Tennessee women’s “audacious” activism (p. 177). Sarah Wilkerson Freeman’s introductory essay for this section concludes “that Tennessee women provided the cutting edge of women’s rights activism and interracial cooperation in the South, making Tennessee exceptional” (p. 180). There is much useful information in these essays. Three of the nine focus on individual women active in temperance, suffrage, prostitution, and education reform efforts. Other essays, such as Elton H. Weaver III’s “‘Working with Our Own Hands’: Church of God in Christ Women in Tennessee, Early 1900s–1950s,” analyze the work of groups of women. Richly contextualized, Weaver’s essay argues that women from the Church of God...

‘Wandering and settled tribes’: biopolitics, citizenship, and the racialized migrant

This paper argues that purportedly outdated racial categories continue to resonate in contemporary forms of racialization. I examine the use of metaphors of rootedness and shadows by a contemporary UK migrant advocacy organization and its allies to justify migrant regularization and manage illicit circulation. I argue that the distinction between rooted and rootless peoples draws on the colonial and racial distinctions between wandering and settled peoples. Contemporary notions of citizenship continue to draw upon and activate racial forms of differentiation. Citizenship is thus part of a form of racial governance that operates not only along biological but also social and cultural lines, infusing race into the structures, practices, and techniques of governance.

Turning the race-class dialectic on its head: the case of an AFL union

Using his research into the American Federation of Musicians, the author shows how those trained in jazz and classical music responded negatively to the emergence of jump blues and rock-and-roll music in the late 1940s. Interracial solidarity within the union was made possible in part by the creation of a particular class distinction based on taste, formed through musical training and performance. Though it has been customary for followers of W. E. B. Du Bois such as David Roediger, who describes the ‘dialectic of race and class’, to emphasise the critical factor of race in US class formation, this article suggests the need for a more nuanced position. In his study, the author shows how class solidarity can be made possible through racial distinction, while in other cases interracial solidarity is constructed around class distinction. To expand our analyses of how class mediates racial formations means examining cultural, discursive and ideological dimensions of class as well as the structural aspects.

The Necropolitics of Drones

The rapid increase in the use and capabilities of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or “drones,” has led to debates on their place in US strategy, particularly their use in assassination missions, or so-called targeted killings. However, this debate has tended to focus narrowly on two questions: first, whether the US use of UAVs to assassinate its enemies, including US citizens, is legal, and second, whether drones should be given the autonomy to decide when to kill humans. This paper uses the concept of “necro-politics”—the arrogation of the sovereign's right both to command death and to assign grievable meaning to the dead—as it emerges in the work of Achille Mbembe to criticize the assumptions of these questions. It is argued that debates over endowing drones with the autonomy to kill humans assume that the current human operators of drones work outside of the context of racial distinction and colonial encounter in which they already make decisions to kill. The paper supports this argument with reference to the text of a US investigation into a strike which killed civilians in Uruzgan province, Afghanistan.