Racial Feeling Research Articles

Transracial and Transnational Adoption in Children’s Literature: Implications for Asian American Adoptees’ Representation, Cultural Authenticity, and Identity

This study explores how Asian American adoptee emerging adults make sense of children’s literature on adoption and their own experiences. Participants included nine transracial, transnational adoptees from China and South Korea ranging from 20 to 25 years old. They participated in a survey and a semi-structured interview to discuss their reaction to adoption-related children’s books and personal reflections. Using reflexive thematic analysis, the findings are organized into six themes: (a) terminology, (b) my parents’ story, (c) relatability, (d) multidimensional narratives, (e) racial feelings, and (f) critical reflections on societal issues. Informed by our findings, recommendations for increasing the representation of Asian American adoptees in children’s literature are discussed.

James Hunt, Robert Knox, and the Feelings of Empirical Race Science

This paper argues that in the mid-nineteenth century, practitioners of the nascent discipline of racial science sought to create an empiricist praxis that was divorced from feelings to describe the so-called facts of race. And yet, while scientific race was framed as a taxonomic system that might label, order, and know what race is, this knowledge system depended upon an understanding of how certain races feel. This paper examines the works of James Hunt and Robert Knox, prominent race scientists whose writings suggest a future of empirical mastery over the racialized and their allegedly chaotic affects. Unruly racial feeling, however, is also essential to the structure of this ostensibly empirical discipline. While race science suggests the eventual containment of disruptive racial feeling, this promise is forever deferred because the foundation of the praxis relies on the very emotion it disavows.

DESIGN INTERVENTION ON THE MOTIF PATTERNS OF “KAPDA GONDA” CRAFT OF DONGRIA KONDH TRIBE OF ORISSA

India is a country with rich heritage of traditional textiles. It is a cluster of art and crafts of various communities and tribes. Tribal textiles are distinguished by their one-of-a-kindness, which reflects racial feelings and cultural identity. “Dongria Kondh” is a tribe from Odisha, lives on the hills of Niyamgiri, particularly on Rayagadha district. The importance of this community is that their arts and crafts reflect the importance of the mountains strain. The triangular design on the walls of the village and the colourful cloth embroidery they wear called "Kapda Gonda”. The design for adornment of kapda gonda reflects with the ethnic identity. The research process includes ethnographic investigation to profile social and cultural importance of Kapda Gonda in the form of interview of artisans for the process and embroidery involved in “Kapda Gonda”. The main purpose of the study is to provide training to the artisans to explore new ways of design intervention in the patterns of traditional motifs of Kapda Gonda to create awareness of their own craft flexibility within their community. With design intervention in Kapda Gonda motifs the artisans could make wide range of motifs for the modern society.

ERASING THE AETHIOPIAN IN CICERO'S POST REDITUM IN SENATU

The Roman attitude toward the Ethiopian as expressed in scattered passages is far less kindly than the Greek. The usage in Terence and the Auctor ad Herennium which imply a vogue for Ethiopians is probably in imitation of Greek usage. How early the Roman attitude crystalized into racial feeling it is hard to say, and as those who express it are chiefly satirists one must be careful in drawing conclusions. Nevertheless in the absence of an expressed good will and in the face of references which have a superior or contemptuous tone it is evident that the Romans had no special affection for Ethiopians at Rome, however romantically they may have spoken of the races of distant India. The earliest passage in which they are spoken of slightingly seems to be in Cicero—cum hoc homine an cum stipite Aethiope, Cicero, De Sen., 6. The word does not occur in all the manuscripts and the Oxford and Teubner texts omit it entirely. In notes it is translated ‘blockhead’ and the statement made that in antiquity the Ethiopians were synonymous with stupidity, a conclusion obviously drawn from the passage and the modern attitude toward them. Even if the word was actually used by Cicero, this passage alone is basis for such a theory.Mrs. Beardsley (op. cit., pp.119–120), in my judgement, is wrong in her conclusion that the Roman attitude toward the Negro crystallized into racial feeling. In support of her view that the Romans referred to the Ethiopians at Rome in a superior and contemptuous tone, Mrs. Beardsley includes the following passages: (1) Cicero, Red. in Sen., 6.14 (cited incorrectly as De Sen., 6); (2) Martial, VI, 39, 6; (3) Juvenal, II, 23. Cicero, Red in Sen., 6.14…cum hoc homine an stipite Aethiope…, as Mrs. Beardsley admits, does not appear in all the manuscripts and is omitted in the best established texts. A consideration of the context leads me to believe that the editors (Oxford, Teubner, Loeb) are right in rejecting Aethiope or stipite Aethiope and in reading stipite. Nevertheless, the appearance of the variant indicates that the author of the reading used Aethiope in a derogatory sense. (It is possible that the pejorative meaning of aethiops was a medieval development.)In these two excerpts, Grace Hadley Beardsley and Frank M. Snowden, Jr., discuss the appearance of the word Aethiops (‘Aethiopian’) in Cicero's Post reditum in senatu 14. Beardsley, whose intellectual project was motivated, as Maghan Keita and, more recently, Najee Olya have discussed, by racial animus and who sought to find evidence of Greco-Roman anti-Blackness that was both consistent with, and therefore a legitimizing exemplum for, contemporary anti-Blackness in 20th-century America, took Cicero's words as ‘the earliest passage in which [Aethiopians] are spoken of slightingly’ at Rome—doing so cautiously, given the fact that most editors had deleted it from the text. Frank M. Snowden, Jr.—whose own work W.E.B. Du Bois explicitly contrasted with Beardsley—responded to Beardsley's assertion that Post reditum in senatu contained evidence of anti-Blackness with scepticism, ultimately doubting the legitimate textual presence of the term and interpreting its presence instead as an artefact of hostile scribal intervention. Indeed, both Beardsley and Snowden discuss the fact that Aethiope does not occur in all of the Cicero manuscripts. While it is true that none of the authoritative textual editions print Aethiope at Post reditum in senatu 14, the textual apparatus nonetheless demonstrates clearly that the term appears in the manuscript tradition more often than it does not:stipe P1: etiope P2stipe uel ethiope Guel aethiope stipe E1esope H

Affective legacies: narrating the intergenerational transmission of racial feeling in oral history interviews

ABSTRACT This article explores the concept of affective legacies – the intergenerational transmission of affect through storytelling and embodied performance. I examine affective legacies as embedded in oral history interviews of school desegregation in rural North Carolina and what these oral history interviews teach us about how performances of memory shape our understandings of racism and racial integration as an embodied and affective practice. This study illuminates how affective legacies guide our relations, inform the way we perceive and remember, shaping an emotional meaning-making system that motivates our personal and cultural understandings and judgments as well as contemporary stories of racial struggles.

Race, ethnicity, and class issues in Fiji soccer 1980-2015

ABSTRACT This article explores the race and class issues which continue to define Fiji soccer and perplex its stakeholders up to the present day. Cultural hegemony is clearly present with indigenous Fijian ex-star players finding it difficult to reach positions of status in administration and management after their playing careers end; this usually condemns them to a life of village-based poverty and (from a secular western standpoint) unemployment. The Fiji-Indian community (37.5% of the total population) ‘controls’ the game, and indigenous Fijian stars are basically accepted as players but not as managers or administrators. Although deliberate racism is probably not common, the game’s culture is imbued with a ‘racial feeling’, to quote the ex-Ba and Fiji player (and Fiji-Indian) Julie Sami, and is exclusionary in its effects. Fiji-Indian stereotypes of indigenous Fijians as lazy, ill-disciplined, and prone to drunkenness mirror white stereotypes about black footballers referred to in prior literature.

The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race. Adrienne Brown

How did the skyscraper influence the way race was perceived? What is architecture’s relation to feelings of race? These are the central questions animating Adrienne Brown’s The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race. The book examines how race is framed in early to mid-twentieth-century accounts of embodied and affective perceptions of race within skyscrapers. While the novel and short story are the primary sites of Brown’s investigation, she also offers close readings of other texts and aesthetic mediums, such as Le Corbusier’s When the Cathedrals Were White (1947) and the artwork of Aaron Douglas. Throughout her careful literary exegesis, she skillfully weaves in discussions of architectural theory, cultural history, and racial discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. In each chapter, Brown spotlights a different way skyscrapers disrupted racial perception and racial feeling, from occluding racial identification from its vertical viewpoints to representing the yet-to-be modes of affiliation within Blackness.

Reconsidering Palmer v Thompson

Reconsidering Palmer <scp>v</scp> Thompson

Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion by Jeffrey Santa Ana

Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion by Jeffrey Santa Ana

Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion by Jeffrey Santa Ana

Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion by Jeffrey Santa Ana

Remediating Fassbinder in Video Installations by Ming Wong and Branwen Okpako

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s tackling of race, immigration, and interracial relationships in his early plays and films is often applauded for offering a prescient treatment of topics largely neglected in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His experimentation with and blending of both queer and leftist political styles appeals to contemporary critics and artists grappling with the continuing challenge of ‘decolonizing’ structures of racial feeling. Nonetheless, the politics of race in Fassbinder’s films from the early 1970s, including Whity (1970) and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), has also come under more skeptical scrutiny during the past decade. Critics have assessed Fassbinder’s aesthetic alongside the biographical and social context of his filmmaking career, and in particular, his relationships with men of color who also starred in Whity and Ali, among other films. Some note a troubling tension between the professed antiracist politics of Fassbinder and of some of his film characters, on the one side, and the way in which the camerawork allows and invites racist pleasures, on the other. Perhaps due to their very ambiguity, Fassbinder’s films offer compelling objects of attachment and resignification for contemporary artists of color working in Germany. In this article I discuss two video installations by Ming Wong and one by Branwen Okpako that engage films by Fassbinder as productive intertexts for their own artistic reflections on racial oppression, solidarity, and desire in contemporary Germany. Wong’s Lerne Deutsch mit Petra von Kant (Learn German with Petra von Kant, 2007) considers the consequences of appropriating camp, high melodrama, and masochism for dramatizing race and immigration. Can such an appropriation dismantle national or racialized identities, analogous to Bitter Tears’ dismantling of gender? Angst Essen/Eat Fear (2008) hones in on, and subtly revises, the sources of the film’s troubling political ambiguity. Okpako’s Seh ich was, was du nicht siehst? (Do I see something you don’t?, 2002) contextualizes the masochistic figure of Whity with a discussion of black actors’ working conditions. It thereby complements the parodic subversion of white fantasies with a consideration of the agency exercised by racialized subjects’ contending with racial difference in the art world and in so-called postracial societies more generally. The video installations highlight the aesthetic inventiveness of Fassbinder’s films, but also use the political shortcomings of his works and changes in the contexts of reception as opportunities for imaginative appropriations and creative openings.

The Sound of Racial Feeling

Critics continue to debate the value of U.S. black music according to a flawed distinction between racial authenticity and social construction. Both sides have it half-right. Black music's value arose historically as the result of a fundamental contradiction in the logic of race tracing back to the slave era. As “Negro” in form, the music was constituted as the collective property of another property, a property-in-slaves. The incongruity produced a perception of black music as an auditory form embodied with fleshly substance, and this sense of racial feeling would live on despite its inconsistencies with modern ideas about race.

Marcus Garvey in Stereograph

What is the relationship between photography and diaspora? How did this relationship stave off the catastrophe of black life? This essay uses the nineteenth-century photographic form of the stereograph as a hermeneutic. Through an examination of two iconic photographs of Pan-African leader Marcus Garvey, the essay shows the role that Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) gave photography to both document and confer consistency and legitimacy to the leader and his movement in the midst of organizational tumult. The organization broadly, and Garvey especially, used photography to mobilize racial feeling and to assert a vision of black modernity. The essay then considers the collaboration between Harlem studio photographer James VanDerZee and Garvey, who, through the UNIA, hired VanDerZee to document the organization's activities in the summer of 1924. More capaciously, these pairings encourage us to think about the relationship between photography and diaspora.

“An Essential Expression of the People”: Interpretations of Hasidic Song in the Composition and Performance History of Ernest Bloch's Baal Shem

Abstract This article examines Ernest Bloch's Baal Shem: Three Pictures of Chassidic Life, considering its score, its performance history, and early recordings of the second movement, “Nigun,” by Yehudi Menuhin, Joseph Szigeti, and Mischa Elman, to investigate the idea, promoted by the composer and many of his performers and critics, that the music represented Jewish identity through the evocation of Hasidic song. Bloch's score and Menuhin's performances were described as expressing what was often characterized during the early twentieth century as a self-affirming racial feeling that linked the modern diaspora in America to Eastern European Hasidic Jewish communities. With Baal Shem, Bloch and his performers and listeners participated in a self-conscious effort to construct a modern Jewish identity that they believed could be conveyed in the sounds and structures of art music. Menuhin's lifelong friendship and collaboration with Bloch underscores the crucial roles of Bloch's performers in working with the composer to devise compositional and performance tropes for the representation of Hasidic song, and in creating his broad reputation as a composer of a definitive Jewish music, a reputation Bloch would sometimes embrace and at other times disavow.

Still Waters Run Deep: The Complexities of African-American Identities and Political Attitudes

In this paper we argue that the conventional narrative of homogeneity in black public opinion masks variation in the attitudes individual blacks hold about their own communities, personal identities, and their sense of class-consciousness. Utilizing the 2008 CAAPS/ABC News Black Politics Survey, this analysis shows how core American beliefs undermine racial group solidarity while experiences of racial discrimination and feelings of political marginality reinforce communal values among African Americans. The analysis also documents sharp divides among African Americans regarding preferences for national versus racial identities, individual versus communal beliefs, and social class versus racial group attachments. Our analysis reveals that these divides in black opinion over the primacy of identities are conditioned by various factors, specifically the frequency of personal experiences with racial discrimination, attitudes toward racial identity, social class standing, residency in majority black neighborhoods, and financial security. We conclude by discussing the broader implications of heterogeneity in black public opinion for understanding American public opinion wit large.

When Characters Lack Character: A Biomythography

I open with two philosophical gestures that point to the two quandaries that motivate this paper. First, the (im)possibility of biography—an account of some one's life—a documenting that usually, for better or worse, takes the lives of individuals as exemplary to the community, thus setting them apart from, rather than making them part of, the community of counterparts. And second, the problem discourse itself creates: When saying what we mean, does the message always reach its “indicated address” or audience? In critical theory, discourse often seems to circumvent rather than “treat” the material at hand. In keeping with the purpose of this special issue—to speak to comparative racialization—I would like to begin with a brief challenge to this project. I find “comparative racialization” an oxymoron: a promise to render the “races”—bundled into their minoritizations—separate but equal to demonstrate the effectiveness of the happy colored folks' companionability. Good racial feeling, after all, comes in twos (think Lone Ranger and Tonto, Amos and Andy, Sonny and Cher, etc.). My critique here is not meant to be facetious or disrespectful, since I intend to follow the rigorous investigation that I am charged with: bringing pressure to bear on the “comparative” in association with “racialization.” To understand what is being examined here, it is necessary to challenge the possibility of doing anything here. The minute we grasp that two racialized entities can be compared, does a set of proofs—such as, but not limited to, ideas of belonging and community and, more generally, ideas of a literature or literatures, a culture or cultures—then confront us? What if the subjects we choose to engage with are not subjects at all? What if we begin our query with some attention to what makes the subject work? Or, better yet, what tale would we tell about it, if we could? Could we provide a series of ontological proofs about its being that would ground itself in the happy narrative of place, space, and race?

The education of Booker T. Washington: American democracy and the idea of race relations

Preface Introduction 1. Great and Intricate Problem: Democracy, the Negro Problem, and the Idea of Race Relations 2. Negroes Whose Habits You Know: The Boy, Booker, Progress, and Racial Feeling 3. They Will Pull Against You the Load Downward: The Freedpeople's Failure and Booker Washington's Rescue 4. Gathered from Miscellaneous Sources: Democratic Possibilities and Other Kinds of Racial Feelings 5. Prepared for the Exercise of These Privileges: A New Negro and the End of Democracy Notes Index

Reflections of a Reactionary Impressionist

Reflections of a Reactionary Impressionist Bryant Simon (bio) John Lukacs. A Thread of Years. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. vii + 481 pp. $30.00. “A Thread of Years,” John Lukacs writes in the opening pages of this his twentieth book, “does not have a story.” But, he adds, it has a theme. Even more accurately, the book has a tone. This is a dark, backward-looking, and in some ways reactionary historical experiment. Lukacs has crafted a dirge mourning what he sees as the long decline of appropriate manners, of civility, of civilization, and of the gentleman in the “Anglo-American world” over the course of the twentieth century. (Yes, the gentleman, the English gentlemen to be precise: just this term and Lukacs’s insistence on using it conveys a hint of the book’s mood and politics.) Lukacs is a self-professed reactionary. He has no interest in preserving the status quo of today; instead he wants to resurrect an older status quo. His brand of conservatism—Catholic, old-fashioned conservatism as he calls it (pp. 450, 467)—is steeped in the past and as such, has little in common with the free market, futuristic politics of the ex-Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, and his loyal band of short-haired, starched shirt, suburban followers. Like the aging Hungarian nobleman that he is, Lukacs laments the fading away of what he see as timeless moral traditions, universal values, and social hierarchies. 1 While Lukacs longs for the elegance, grace, and sophistication of this imagined lost world of refinement and order, he is convinced that these days are gone for good. From near and far, he describes the waves of vulgarity, cheap amusements, and crass ambitions that throughout the century have steadily eroded the splendor of the Western past. Sure, tattered remnants of this glorious yesterday remained throughout the period, in 1914 and 1939 and 1958, but they are sad, lonely monuments barely standing against the storms of the nouveau riche, consumer capitalism, and narrow political expediency. Lukacs rails against celluloid celebrities, excessive individualism, the false hopes of revolution, the perilous seductions of isolationism, the disease of mindless anti-communism, the brutality of rock-n-roll, and the gilded grandeur of everyday life in the modern world. By 1969, the “best people”—a vaguely defined group—were, he wails, no longer the [End Page 254] most influential people (p. 296); they had lost out to Hollywood moguls, two-bit disciples of Joseph McCarthy, and intellectually bankrupt associate professors of history. Mixing together sweet nostalgia and bitter sarcasm, Lukacs creates detailed pictures of the withering worlds of the “best people.” However, at times, his portraits are marred by garish strokes of essentialism. Perhaps this is the point; that is, Lukacs intentionally deploys a vocabulary that is out of step with contemporary academic conventions, but still there is something jarring about his reductive observations. For Lukacs, Germans are Germans; Poles are Poles; and Philadelphians are Philadelphians. It is all that simple. (Lukacs, by the way, lives in Philadelphia and clearly likes to write about the city.) “His ambitions,” he explains of one of his characters, “you see are American” (p. 64). People in this book possess such things as a “deep Anglo-Saxon—all right, Anglo-Celtic—sense of scruples” (p. 253). “The Germans’ bombing of England,” Lukacs concludes, “awaken[ed] latent racial and cultural inclinations” (p. 283). Gender is as natural as nationalities. Women, in Lukacs’s world, possess a keener sense for social and cultural decline than men (p. 237). Both sexes have “racial feelings lodged in aging bones,” Jews have “Jewish hearts,” and the Spanish are “honestly a conservative people” (pp. 236, 238, 369). While the tone of Lukacs’s A Thread of Time is backward looking, even nostalgic, the book’s style and form are bold and daring. With this study, Lukacs joins a growing list of scholars interested in experimenting with historical narrative. Like historians Natalie Zemon Davis, John Demos, James Goodman, Robert Rosenstone, and Simon Schama, and writers such as Derrick Bell and David Dante Troutt, Lukacs blurs the lines between fact and fiction, truth and imagination, history and story-telling. 2...

Racial Attitudes and Partisan Identification in the United States, 1980-1992

According to some scholars, racial issues have transformed US politics by shaping the development of partisan identification among voters who have entered the electorate since 1964. This theory of `issue evolution' argues that the racial attitudes of Democratic and Republican supporters have become increasingly polarized over the last 30 years, and that this transformation can largely be attributed to generational displacement. Others have challenged this conclusion, arguing that the evidence connecting racial attitudes and partisanship is much less conclusive than has been suggested. This research note addresses the controversy from a different angle. Instead of focussing on the direct effects of racial issues on partisanship, it attempts to illustrate how issue positions on social welfare and economics work together as composite indicators of underlying racial attitudes. The extent to which these social opinions are reflections of latent racial feelings is explored using NES data from the years 1980-92 and creating an index of composite racial attitudes. The data ultimately illustrate how issues concerning race have indeed influenced partisan identification during the period studied, although not in the direct manner that was previously assumed.

Silent Racism and Intellectual Superiority in Peru

Abstract — Historically, racism as it is understood in South Africa or in parts of the Southern United States has not existed in Peru. The absence or at least the existence to a lesser degree of this type of tension grants us a superiority over our northern neighbours. In Peru, emancipation of slaves was relatively easy. This is not to say that there do not exist prejudices against Indians, cholos, and blacks, however these prejudices have not been sanctioned by the law and they have, more than a profound racial feeling, an economic, social and cultural character. Colour does not prevent an aborigine, mestizo, or Negroid from occupying high positions if they can accumulate wealth or achieve political success. Notwithstanding these fortunate cases, there is an enormous distance between the pongos [serfs] of a highland hacienda … and those highly cultured and refined Limeños, who routinely travel to Europe. This distance is neither racial, nor based on place of origin, rather it corresponds to what can be termed an historical state of things (Jorge Basadre, 1964:4686).