Racial Others Research Articles

Race and Populism. A Comparative Study of Thatcherism, Peronism and the American Populists

Abstract This article re-examines the race-populism nexus. It asks: Does populist political construction of the figure of “the people” necessarily involve processes of racial othering? We answer this question by revisiting three emblematic cases of populism. Each historical case illustrates a basic type of identity formation that can have an i) exclusionary, ii) ambivalent or iii) positive impact on racial justice. The first case is Thatcherism, whose “authoritarian populism” feeds on and reinforces anti-Black racial prejudice. The second is Peronism, which has an ambivalent relationship with race that promises to shed important new light on this classic case of populism. The third case is that of the American Populists, whose pioneering experiments in interracial politics remain an enduring illustration of populism’s progressive potential. In each case, we focus on a key document from that political regime/movement: the Conservative Manifesto of 1979, the Peronist Constitution of 1949, and the Omaha Platform of 1892. The article concludes that populism, as a logic of action, acts as a catalyst that intensifies whatever specific content is mobilised – racist and anti-racist content alike.

Thinking the Other: From Terra Australis Incognita to Terra Nullius

At the end of the 18th century, when Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, recommended Botany Bay in Australia as an “advantageous” site to establish a new British penal colony, he did so with the knowledge that the east coast of the country was inhabited by Indigenous Australians, having traveled to the South Continent with Lieutenant James Cook. As a naturalist and imperial botanist on board the Endeavour, Banks’s primary duty had been to identify and classify Australian flora and fauna. Yet, the multiple observations that he made based on his interactions with Aboriginal people also contributed to establish his influence in scientific and political circles at the turn of the 19th century. Banks’s ethnographic accounts recorded in his Endeavour Journal shed light on his mind-set and convictions during his time in Australia as well as his impressions that later played their part in making him the greatest proponent of settlement in New South Wales and motivating the decision to colonize the country. In a time when exploration records significantly shaped the perceptions of the public about human nature and the beliefs and theories of the scientific community on questions of race and otherness, the writings of Joseph Banks offer a window into science and history in the making. As the scientific exploration of distant lands progressively gave way to political and economic interests, the transition from geographical othering to racial othering in the representation of Indigenous Australians turned Terra Australis Incognita into terra nullius.

‘They Will Shoot You to a Pulp!’ The Racialisation of Migrant Workers in the Emotive Cyberspace of ptt

Abstract This article analyses how social media users ‘reimagined’ the death of an undocumented Vietnamese migrant worker in 2017 in Taiwan and revealed their views on ethnic hierarchy and the judicial system as a public institution. By conceptualising posting on ptt, a Chinese-language bbs platform likened to Reddit, as a racialising process, this article finds posters’ reimagination of this event being characterised by criminalisation, dehumanisation, and distrust of the judicial system. Laden with emotions, some users displayed racial othering of migrant workers through militant masculinity, whereas others called for intersubjectivity and respect for life and rights. Some users equated being pro-police with being pro-violence, in contrast to others’ demand to regulate the police’s use of firearms. The totality of these views suggests that ptt is a volatile sociopolitical space facilitating antagonistic views. The racialising discourse echoes the exclusionary guest worker system adopted in Taiwan that regards migrant workers as the disposable and inferior other.

“#AsiatiquesDeFrance”: confronting anti-Asian racism in contemporary France through digital media

Anti-Asian racism and violence have escalated around the world, coinciding with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, in France, racially motivated violence against people perceived as “Asian” was already on the rise, even before the pandemic. Frustrated by the lack of public outrage and the inaction of government authorities, people of Asian heritage in France – who have come from a diverse range of countries, over several generations – have begun mobilizing collectively in new and more ambitious ways. Young people, in particular, have taken to the internet. Using social media platforms, they have not only organized in-person events, including protest marches in central Paris that have numbered in the tens of thousands of people, but have also cultivated online communities focusing on racial solidarity with just as many followers. Social media accounts, hashtags, YouTube webseries, podcasts, and internet-based projects aiming to combat anti-Asian racism while also promoting intersectional racial justice, have thus proliferated in the past few years. This article examines a few prominent examples of these works, including the viral video “#AsiatiquesDeFrance” (2017), to argue that all of these forms convey common messages that deal explicitly with issues of cultural assimilation, national belonging, racial othering, and racism faced by people of Asian heritage in France.

Adapting Whiteness Katherine of Aragon in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s All is True and Starz’s The Spanish Princess

The sources influencing Shakespeare’s representation of racialized queens continue to shape popular media representations of queenship. In this article, I argue that Juan Luis Vives’ Instruction of a Christian Woman influenced Shakespeare’s representation of Katherine of Aragon’s idealized whiteness in All is True (Henry VIII). Moreover, I show how Vives and Shakespeare in turn influence Starz’s 2019 The Spanish Princess. Firstly, I how Vives represents the domestic space of the royal household a form of racial enclosure intended to manage the paradoxical confluence of the queen’s biological reproductivity and the social circulation of her image. Katherine’s patronage of Vives demonstrates her agency in cultivating her cult of queenship through gendered and racially charged notions of kinship, conduct, and labor. These tropes elevate the racial purity of the queen through and at the expense of lower class and enslaved peoples whose work is often rendered invisible. I also argue that Vives and Shakespeare’s praise of Katherine’s exemplary kinship, conduct and labor function as compensatory mechanisms that serve to reify Katherine’s whiteness even as her marriage to Henry VIII is failing. While Starz’s The Spanish Princess recasts Katherine of Aragon’s story through the contemporary lens of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, it nevertheless borrows from Shakespeare and Vives’ construction of queenly whiteness at the expense of racial others.

Reframing the Refugee: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Compassionate Politics

Countless polls, studies and surveys conducted prior to and following the 2016 UK Referendum on Membership of the European Union confirmed immigration to be the key emotive issue for not only the British electorate, but several Western European nations. By critiquing key pieces of EU legislation, Go, Went, Gone (2015) by Jenny Erpenbeck offers a humanising, caustic warning of the troubling politicisation of EU and non-EU migration in Germany, suggesting the ways by which literature can destabilise institutional optics of power and counteract myths surrounding the process of racial othering.

Protectors and Modern Princesses: A Qualitative Investigation of Gender Ideals Among Young Migrants in Berlin

The debates at the nexus of migration and gender often focus on the supposedly diverging ideals Muslims and Christians have about gender. Migrant femininities and masculinities are framed in contrast to liberal, Western values and they undermine the efforts for more gender equality in Western societies. Only a few studies have addressed non-Muslim migrants' construction of, and their perceptions of, the femininities and masculinities of others. To fill this gap, we present the findings of a qualitative social research project where 43 young people aged 16 to 29 shared with us their perceptions regarding gender ideals. In our analysis, we utilize theories developed within women's studies and critical men and masculinities scholarship and adopt an intersectional lens to investigate how young first- and second-generation migrants in Berlin with roots in different world regions imagine their own and others' ideals of masculinity and femininity. Like non-migrant youth, our research participants want their life partnerships to be based on gender equality. Contrary to this, their ideals of femininity and masculinity embrace traditional gender roles, and they mirror the racialized relations in German society. We do not argue that the migrant youth's gender ideals are significantly shaped by their ethnic or religious belonging, and thus they do differ from those of non-migrant youth. However, racial othering is relevant for these migrants' images of their life partners and should be taken under consideration while designing specific policies aimed at increasing levels of gender equality in multi-diverse societies.

Restricted affiliation: the costs of otherness among Afroczechs

ABSTRACT The increasing presence of African diasporic people in Europe and their identity politics have given rise to a proliferation of studies on their experiences, albeit with the exception of central eastern Europe (CEE). This research expands on this scholarship by addressing lived experiences, racialisation processes and struggles to belong among Afropeans in Czechia. Grounded in ethnography the study draws from narrative interviews with self-identified Afroczechs who are closely connected to both their African heritage and their Czechness. We conceptualise their identity politics as Restricted Affiliation in a sense that the state of belonging to Czechia has distinct limits due to the high costs of racial Otherness they experience. The findings demonstrate the limits of a shared language vis-à-vis racial ideologies in Czech national identity constructions and contribute to more visibility and further theorising of Czech blackness.

Race-Religious Discrimination in South Africa's Hindu Marriages

South Africa is known historically for racial apartheid when people were classified as white, Indian, Colored, or Black/Native.1 Indians, Coloreds, and Blacks were discriminated against and denied rights afforded to whites. One example was the right to vote, which was withheld from anyone not classified as white.2 What is less well known is that other forms of discrimination also existed, including religion, culture, gender, and sexual orientation. These discriminations manifested in religious marriage laws. They also intersected in the domain of marriage through race and religion, resulting in what Rabiat Akande describes as “mutually imbricated religious and racial othering.”3 Akande's observation that “Euro-Christian foundations of the legal regime of religious liberty” excluded minority religions from legal protections in colonial settler situations resonates in South Africa.4 Apartheid South Africa adopted a colonial European Christianized approach to marriage, namely, the voluntary union of one man to one woman for the duration of the marriage.5 This definition of marriage was embedded within South Africa's common law and entrenched values of heteronormativity and monogamy, both of which are inherent in a Christian understanding of marriage. Consequently, same-sex marriages were excluded from legal protection.6 Similarly, customary marriages and Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish marriages were not legally recognized because they were potentially polygynous, which in South Africa was deemed immoral and contrary to the colonial and apartheid era notions of public policy.7 This essay focuses on the legal implications of Hindu marriages not being legally recognized in South Africa, and especially the disparate effect that this has on women. The essay thus adds a gendered dimension to Akande's arguments about religious discrimination.

디킨즈의 『블리크 하우스』에 나타난 자민족중심주의

In Bleak House, Charles Dickens reinforces the idea of superior Englishness through the replication of the English space, Bleak House, contributing to the creation and dissemination of English culture. However, it cannot be overlooked that in this process, Dickens becomes immersed in ethnocentrism, not only demeaning racial otherness, such as Africans or Native Americans but also expressing disdain towards Frenchness. Additionally, Dickens exhibits a pronounced aversion to women actively engaging in the public sphere, deeming them nonconformists and un-English. In the process of Dickens praising the superiority of Englishness, it is undeniable that racial and gender discriminatory attitudes become evident.

Odmienność i tożsamość w powieści Daphne Palasi Andreades Brown Girls

The article explores how Daphne Palasi Andreades presents the impact of assimilation and racial otherness on the immigrants' identity in her novel Brown Girls. First, the article explores theoretical approaches connected with immigration, with special attention paid to the processes of assimilation, acculturation, and collective identity. Subsequently, the analysis of the novel presents how the process of assimilation alters one's identity as well as disrupts interpersonal relationships. With the use of immigration and identity theory, the paper presents how individual identity clashes with collective identity and shows that an individual can become "the other" to those with whom they once formed a community. The article explores the fictionalized version of the immigrants' experiences, allowing for more in-depth analysis due to access to individuals' thoughts and emotions. The results of the analysis correspond with the findings of the presented theoretical approaches thus illustrating that fiction mirrors real life and allows non-specialists to understand complicated concepts connected with immigrants' identity though the act of reading fiction.

Racial Othering: structural roots and anti-racist actions from below

Racial Othering: structural roots and anti-racist actions from below

The Providential Genocides: Racial Survival and Acts of God in Fin-de-Siècle Apocalyptic Fiction

This paper focuses on three narratives from the popular press during the boom in apocalyptic literature at the turn of the twentieth century: George Griffith’s Olga Romanoff (1894), Robert Barr’s “Within an Ace of the End of the World” (1900), and M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901). In all three texts, a catastrophic event causes the near extinction of humanity, and the event is inscribed in a religious narrative wherein humanity’s moral failings justify the cataclysm. In these texts, the survivors are European or descended from Europeans, such that post-apocalyptic humanity is exclusively White; all racial Others are depicted as unworthy of divine protection, or even as worthy of divine destruction. The survivors of these disasters fuse social Darwinism and theology to present themselves as racially superior and thus divinely favoured, compared to the deceased. The providential genocide significantly alters ethical ramifications by ensuring that racial elimination does not occur because of deliberate actions on the part of characters, sparing them from any culpability; instead, racial cleansing is presented as God’s will. This sets up a White exclusivist racial utopia free of moral stain, although the persistence of racial ideology into the apocalypse can undermine the utopian sentiment.

ROMA AS A MATRIX OF THE ‘OTHER’IN THE PROJECTION OF ORIENTALISM, RACE, AND NATION IN THE WORKS BY OLHA KOBYLIANSKA

The paper analyzes the images of Romani in the works by Olha Kobylianska against the background of the multiethnic situation in Bukovyna, and traces the influence of the anthropological interpretation of the Gypsies as a race and a pre-modern people on the representation of Romani in the literature of the Romanticism period and the 2nd half of the 19th century.
 Kobylianska treats the Gypsies not only as an exotic ‘other’ but also as an integral part of the cultural and ethnic identity of Ukrainian society and analyzes the relationship between Romani as monads and settled peasants, as well as the processes of assimilation and integration of Gypsies into the Ukrainian environment. By depicting the colourful images of the Roma in her works, Kobylianska unfolds conflict situations related to the struggle for land and the participation of ‘outsiders’ in them. The Gypsy is a figure of the stranger who serves as a matrix of ‘otherness’ for her and functions in various semantic projections. Such a matrix is projected onto the life of Hutsuls as children of nature; it correlates with the situation of reversed gender, in particular feminine identity; it serves as an attribute of exotic and oriental racial otherness. Adopting romantic oriental stereotypes about Gypsies, Kobylianska, in accordance with the anthropology of the time, marks them racially (through the signification of the ‘black’ body) and geographically (through their belonging to the Oriental world). At the same time, she brings these images closer to Ukrainian life and everyday routine and doesn’t ignore the assimilation and relations between Ukrainians and Gypsies. Settled and nomadic peoples, insiders and outsiders become the backdrop against which Kobylianska unfolds the drama of shaping the modern Ukrainian nation.

The “kala–admi” and the “golden-haired, fair-complexioned hero”: Racial Othering and the Question of the Aboriginals in the Fairy Tale Collections of Colonial Bengal

ABSTRACT This article discusses how the representational politics of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengali fairy tales was heavily informed by the racial discourses of the time. The racial discourses of colonial Bengal worked in close association with the discourses of anthropology and nationalism. The discourse of ethnographic nationalism prepared the ground for the historical rise of the Hindu, upper-caste, urban, elite, male subjectivity and enabled it to define and “speak” for the so-called “aboriginal” groups in a way that best suited their convenience. The contemporary idea of the “black,” “ugly,”“backward,” and “uncivilized” aboriginals influenced the representation of the rakshasas or the giants in the fairy tales of colonial Bengal. The article analyzes the ways in which the project of fairy tale collection turned into an upper-caste, Hindu, elite discourse in the hands of the Bengali intellectuals, which operated primarily by marginalizing the category of the aboriginals. The article also historically contextualizes the categories of the elite and the aboriginal in connection with the arya-anarya theory of race, popular in nineteenth-century Bengal.

Racial Othering and Relational Wellbeing: African Refugee Youth in Australia

Racialised and culturally distinct refugee groups increasingly face hostilities and negative representations in countries of resettlment. The experience of African refugee youth in Australia illustrates this general trend. This paper explores how racial Othering discourse seriously undermines the group’s wellbeing. The article concentrates in particular on two aspects of relational wellbeing, the capacity to move in public without fear or shame and the ability to feel a sense of belonging to the place where one lives in. Theoretically, the paper draws together work on wellbeing from a capability approach and relational perspective with interdisciplinary literature on racial Othering. Empirically, the paper demonstrates the pervasive culture of racial Othering through media identifications of African youth with criminality and gang violence and illustrates impacts on young people’s wellbeing through data from interviews with African refugee youth. The youth’s accounts show how it feels to be a problem and what it means not to belong.

Refugee education: a critical visual analysis

ABSTRACT Refugee education has become an issue of national and international concern as the numbers of refugees rise globally. In a world where global issues such as forced migration are communicated and consumed through the visual mode, understanding how discursive agendas are constituted visually is important. This paper explores the representations of Refugee Education, toggled with Refugees and Education with a focus on images available from a Google Images search. The analysis is framed by critical visual literacy, with the assumption that visual images are embedded in wider sociocultural practices and ideologies. Images of Refugee Education depict impoverished, teacher-centred classrooms, restricted knowledge and a docile population. Toggling with images of Refugees emphasises the racial otherness of refugee students, their numbers, and schooling as the means to contain the discursively constructed representations of refugees-as-threat. Toggling with Education emphasises Refugee Education as merely an issue of access, rather than quality, inclusive or lifelong learning as envisaged in Sustainable Development Goal 4. We conclude that images of refugee education undermine the quest for a compassionate inclusive education for refugees of all ages and that caution and critique are needed in the consumption of images.

African Diasporic Narratives from the Czech Republic

Abstract Studies have addressed the historical trajectories of people of African heritage in the Czech Republic (CR), but there is no comprehensive study of the contemporary lives and identities of African people. Given the increasing number of African people living in the country, research into an emerging African diaspora is imperative. This empirical study emerges as part of a larger project which aims to address this paucity through an interdisciplinary and ethnographic lens. Its primary aim is to develop a detailed and nuanced account of sociopolitical identities among people of African heritage in the CR by focusing on the dynamics of language and race and, to a lesser degree, gender. Theoretically based on intersectionality and drawing from the recently developed framework of ‘raciolinguistics’, this paper provides the first diasporic narratives of African people in the CR who have varying degrees of Czech language fluency and experience diverse forms of racialisation and racism. Individual multiple life trajectories in the CR suggest that African migrants feel caught in a complex matrix of linguistic and racial discrimination but that they have a sense of reasonable safety and security. This highly ambiguous space also shows that, on the one hand, there are instances where Czech language skills have the capacity to mitigate the challenges in racial discourse and racism, but on the other hand there are clear limits to the power of language in the face of racial Othering and racism.

Race and the shantytown in a race-less country: negros villeros, whiteness and urban space in Argentina

ABSTRACT In this article, we look at the racialization of the people living in precarious and informal urbanizations known as villas in Argentina. In a country traditionally defined by narratives of whiteness and Europeanness, villeros have functioned as a central figure of racial otherness. Though some studies acknowledge the racism suffered by villeros, how this racialization has unfolded and transformed over time remains a question rarely examined. Here, we look at their racialization focusing on two critical moments. First, the period including the 1950s and 1960s when villeros emerged as racialized figures in need of modernization. Second, the period of neoliberal reforms in the 1990s when villeros shifted from being subjects requiring civilizing to becoming a security threat to be dealt with by police force. By contrasting these two regimes of (hyper)visibility and racialization of villeros, we demonstrate that the villas are not a specific type of urban development but a diversity of urbanizations brought together by a set of approaches to the spatialized production and management of racial and classist exclusion. Finally, we argue that it is mainly in cultural production that the dynamics of racialization materialize and become susceptible to contestation.

Strategic generosity among local patrons: Place belonging and ethnic exclusion in a transforming lower‐income neighborhood of Tel Aviv

AbstractWorking at the intersection of exchange theory, urban anthropology, and ethnic and racial studies, this article offers an original perspective on the role of local patrons’ exchange networks in constructing place belonging during racial urban change. Inspired by a middle‐ground approach to reciprocity, embodying both solidarity and distrust within the same ethnic community, and manifested in an interracial context, the article proposes the integrative term of strategic generosity. The concept includes two interlinked layers: the combination of altruism and self‐interest in local patrons’ exchange practices within the same ethnic community, and patron exchange circles as mechanisms for the exclusion of racial Others reproducing boundaries between social groups. The case study is HaTikva—a lower‐income neighborhood in downtown Tel Aviv originally inhabited almost exclusively by disadvantaged Mizrahi Jews (of Middle Eastern origin), and more recently transformed by the arrival of African asylum seekers. Based on fieldwork conducted from 2010 to 2013 among long‐term Mizrahi residents, I argue that although local Mizrahi patrons use parental metaphors to describe their unconditioned giving to their own community; in fact, altruist and instrumental actions intermingle in the management of their reciprocity network. The exchange networks help vulnerable agents and enhance Mizrahi place attachment, but at the same time buttress the patrons’ own standing in the neighborhood and exclude the non‐Jewish African Others. These findings are discussed in the context of everyday life in a marginalized ethnic community as well as a barrier to integration and the concept's contribution to exchange theory more broadly. [strategic generosity, ethnic exclusion, exchange theory, place belonging, Mizrahi Jews, Tel Aviv]