Racial Others Research Articles

Racial impersonation: Others in Finnish visual culture

The article sketches an overview of the impersonation of Black and Sámi Others in Finnish cinema and visual culture. How and why have Finnish cultural producers used blackface performance or ‘fake’ Sámi garments in their films? By connecting several historically and aesthetically disparate texts, the article makes evident an underpinning structure of racial Othering. The structure is obscured, however, by commentators who argue such Other performance is innocent and not intended to ridicule or harm. This defence maintains that it is White Finns’s power to define what counts as racism. By combining analysis of disparate examples of racial impersonation in cinema and cultural texts with critiques and defences of it, the article traces how structural racism is maintained. Study of cinema history contributes to understanding the history of structural racism.

White is For Witching: A Postcolonial Gothic

In White is for Witching (2009), Helen Oyeyemi defamiliarizes traditional narratives, subverts the classical doctrines and inserts recent issues. Although her novels are mostly read within the scope of gothic literature, she introduces ethnic mythology and folklore that provide myriad perspectives. As well as incorporating the traditional gothic features, Oyeyemi draws from the cultural motifs of her Nigerian roots to highlight the recurring patterns of immigration, coexistence, and integration in English history. Using the vocabulary and the pattern of gothic narration, the novel constructs a postcolonial story to question the xenophobic tendencies of the English nation as a legacy of the colonial era that endures today through immigration policies. Therefore, in this article, I read the novel as a postcolonial gothic criticising the xenophobic concerns of pure white Englishness against racial others and immigrants labelled as invaders of English identity through the elements of cultural gothic.

Nation, Religion, and the Racial Exception: Framing Difference in Turkey

Nationalism presents a multitude of ways to talk about characteristics of its mem-bers and to view how these characteristics are formed in a timeless past. Popula-tions identified as nations imagine themselves as sharing a collective identity and social solidarity. They form discourses offering ways of stipulating what defines nations in terms of collective characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, and religion. In many cases, these outright exclusive characteristics are subterranean, appearing in implicit forms and frequently combining with official claims regarding the civic and constitutional criteria for national membership. Turkish nationalism is no ex-ception. While historical and contemporary examples of exclusion abound in Tur-key's political history, they are countered with official claims of equal and open membership. Often, these exclusions appear to be based on religion, as rules of in-clusion present a preference for Muslims from Sunni backgrounds. Based on two case studies, this article argues that the relationship between nation and religion is mediated through the racial exception. When racial otherness is present, the over-laps between nation and religion may be negotiated, reinterpreted, or disregarded.

InterFaces: On the relationality of vision, face and race in practices of identification. A multimodal intervention.

This article problematizes vision in practices of identification. It draws on the metaphor of the 'interface' to emphasize that vision emerges 'in between' eyes, faces, bodies, objects and ideas of belonging and otherness. As such, vision can be a material and political technology that enacts certain people as racial others. To attend to the materiality and politics of vision and its messy relationship with race, I bring together three European stories in which faces are drawn, seen or identified, while race hides or surfaces in intriguing ways. Through these stories we learn that race is saturated with affect and is recalled in objects and bodies. In addition, this article offers a novel methodological approach. It employs the eyes of the reader not only to read but also to watch. Vision itself becomes a technology, this time not to produce or reinforce, but to disturb and perhaps even undo ideas of racial otherness. Through the use of experimental montage, I attend to the complexities and incongruities of seeing faces and race without settling on a single narrative. I actively engage the eyes of the viewer to argue that vision is always relational and partial and therefore, it can also be harnessed to undo racial otherness by fragmenting, multiplying and affecting.

Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane's City Sketches

Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane's City Sketches

Interior Whiteness: Race and the "Rise of the Novel"

Interior Whiteness:Race and the "Rise of the Novel" Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge Critical whiteness studies in the German context has thus far not examined the literature of the Goethezeit with the same detail as the philosophy of the period or literature and culture of later eras. This discipline also frequently draws on foundational work from the Anglo-American context; Julia Roth remarks that "most German texts on Critical Whiteness relate themselves (at least on the margins) to Toni Morrison's publications."1 Indeed, although Toni Morrison's 1992 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is concerned specifically with how an "Africanist presence" emerges in and defines literature by white American authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she poses a series of questions and calls for further examination that I see as entirely applicable to other (pre)national literatures and periods as well.2 In her preface, Morrison questions the relationship between race and notions of humanistic or universal literature: "How is 'literary whiteness' and 'literary blackness' made, and what is the consequence of that construction? How do embedded assumptions of racial (not racist) language work in the literary enterprise that hopes and sometimes claims to be 'humanistic?'" (xii–xiii) Later in the text, she offers an explicit series of calls for projects that she views as essential to understanding literary whiteness. Morrison asks, "In what ways does the imaginative encounter with Africanism enable white writers to think about themselves?"3 She then elaborates on this question by outlining multiple areas for future study: We need studies of the ways in which an Africanist character is used to limn out and enforce the invention and implications of whiteness. We need studies that analyze the strategic use of black characters to define the goals and enhance the qualities of white characters. … We need to analyze the manipulation of the Africanist narrative … as a means of meditation—both safe and risky—of one's own humanity.4 Although she couches these projects in terms of a specifically Africanist presence in American literature, I take these needs to apply to racial others in white cultural traditions in other linguistic contexts. I also take them to require attention from white scholars, of whom I am one, as well as BIPOC scholars inside and outside academia—following the lead of Black feminist writers in multiple national traditions, white scholars need to turn a careful eye on white scholarly positioning and practices, as well as white disciplinary [End Page 125] histories.5 In this reflection I outline one avenue for such work in German studies: the conceptions of selfhood emerging in the eighteenth century and still shaping the genre and scholarship of the novel today. In the German context, the discipline of philosophy has undertaken consideration of the question of race in the eighteenth century, perhaps because philosophy makes some of the most explicit claims to universality of the humanistic disciplines.6 Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze traces how Kant insists throughout his anthropological writings that the inherent nature of nonwhite races makes them incapable of full, rational humanity. That is, "for Kant, then, skin color encodes and codifies the 'natural' human capacity for reason and rational talents," and skin color, for Kant is not "merely a physical characteristic," but rather "evidence of an unchanging and unchangeable moral quality."7 Kant's overall conception of human nature means that racial categories and their moral implications are absolute and essential.8 Robert Bernasconi, Jennifer Mensch, and Susan Shell have all built on Eze's work to discuss further details of Kant's racialized anthropology, the relationship between Kant and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and the connection between Kant's anthropology and his aesthetics.9 Peggy Piesche also points out that Kant's racial anthropology prompts him to de facto remove whites from his racial hierarchies "and place them in a sort of neutrality"—a supposed neutrality that also marks the white protagonists of literary texts of the later eighteenth century but is still contested in its earlier decades.10 Susan Buck-Morss's Hegel, Haiti, and Universal history argues that in formulating his master-slave relation, Hegel was directly influenced by the Haitian Revolution.11 While...

자민족중심주의에서 문화적 혼종으로

In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Englishness and English culture seem to be disparaged by the miscegenation of Dorothea Brook, an English lady, and Will Ladislaw, “a dangerously mixed blood” of Englishman and Pole, and rumored to be of Jew and Gypsy. But Dorothea revolts against English ethnocentrism represented by her first husband Edward Casaubon, a sick, incommunicable, and narrow-minded English scholar and embraces cultural hybridity represented by her second husband Will, a vital, open, and sympathetic cosmopolitan bohemian. Eliot’s Will is different from other Victorian writers’ racial others such as Brontë’s Bertha, a Creole, Dickens’s Fagin, a Jew, and Thackeray’s Rhoda, a mulatto, who are eliminated or excluded in the texts to reestablish superior Englishness and English culture. Nonetheless, Eliot doesn’t negate Englishness. Rather, by embracing cultural hybridity, she proposes her grand vision to widen Englishness in the age of English reform around the early 1830s.

The Critical DREAMer Memoir: Educational Mobility and the Limits of Meritocratic Citizenship

AbstractThis article takes up the figure of the DREAMer in the twenty-first-century Latinx memoir by the formerly undocumented to consider the coupling of the right to education with narratability. The author reads Alberto Ledesma’s Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer (2017), Reyna Grande’s The Distance between Us (2012), and Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s Undocumented (2015) as examples of the critical DREAMer memoir, foregrounding suppressed and subversive self-representation. Such self-fashionings are constrained by overachievement while still troubling the myth of meritocracy to determine deservingness of US citizenship. This trio of texts shows how school systems are mechanisms of coercive assimilation that reproduce a ranking regime wherein racial others are excluded or subordinated. Even as school environments can silence, they can also be safe havens for amplifying the human voice. The freedom of expression found in education marks a transformation of silence into advocacy. The present proliferation of critical DREAMer memoirs largely reflects a new shape of post-9/11 Latinx literature, as well as the subgenre of human rights and literature.

Race and Horror in HBO’s Lovecraft Country

This article is an analysis of the HBO series Lovecraft Country in terms of the elements of racism and traditional horror elements present in it, including elements typical of the prose of one of the genre’s creators, H. P. Lovecraft. The purpose of the article is to explore typical horror elements that appear in the series and show how the authors of the series combine traditional horror with the horror of everyday life in the oppressed Black community in 1950s America. At the beginning of the article, the series and its main idea are described. The article then takes up the subject of the portrayal of racism in the series, specific examples of which are presented and discussed in terms of their compatibility with the realities of America at the time. The article also discusses elements related to the antiracism movement – situations presented in the series that exemplify the character’ struggle against racism are shown. Then the otherness depicted in the series is discussed – not only racial otherness, but also gender and sexual otherness; in this part of the article, otherness is given as a reason for oppression by society. The article also explores the use of traditional elements of horror genre in the series – it indicates which scenes in the series use the traditional concepts of the horror genre, and attempts to show which characters in the series function as monsters in the story. At the end of the article, it is explained how the series draws inspiration in the works of Lovecraft, whose name appears in the very title of the series.

Racial others & settler colonialism in Israel: migrant rights claims refracted through colonial logics

ABSTRACT From 2006, thousands of migrants crossed into Israel after travelling through the Sinai Desert. The majority came from Eritrea and Sudan, seeking asylum from state violence. Israel’s government classified them as ‘infiltrators’ using a law enacted in 1954 to criminalize Palestinians seeking to return to expropriated lands. Drawing on fieldwork in Israel in 2018–2019, the article examines dimensions of a process of political subjectivation among these migrants and citizens in solidarity with them. It is concerned with the performative effects of a struggle migrants waged for refugee status by contesting their construction in government discourse as infiltrators. It argues their claims became refracted through debates over contours of a fissured collective self, which challenged the limits of political community. While their claims disrupted the order’s dividing lines, the article argues the latter proved durable, that conditions of possibility for disruptive speech are mediated by overlapping structures of colonialism and racializations.

‘We just want to make art’ – Women with experiences of racial othering reflect on art, activism and representation

In recent years, Swedish women belonging to a post-migrant generation have made their voices against racism and social inequality prominent within public debate. Engaging in segregated and economically deprived suburbs, these women make use of art in order to counter stereotypical narratives of themselves and their communities. Based on interviews from two research projects, Accessing Utopia and Gendered Islamophobia in Sweden, this article aims to understand the complexities in using art to protest racist structures and stereotypes. In what ways are the young women making room for their own creative expressions in Swedish society, while countering processes of othering? How does the work of representation affect them? What meaning do the women give to the platforms and networks they have been involved in? This article shows that the women’s early experiences of othering and meeting likeminded youths play a central role in order to either enter or create collective platforms where they can creatively engage in expressing their subjectivities and counter society’s controlling images. Projects and platforms such as Revolution Poetry and Swedish hijabis provided collective self-care through support and confidence building among youths from marginalized communities. These platforms can be seen as an artistic homeplace for the interlocutors. The article also shows that the work of representation is sometimes felt as limiting. The activism the women engage in is a deeply personal struggle for self-valuation and seeking ways to live a life on one’s own terms.

Queering the Global Filipina Body: Contested Nationalism in the Filipina/o Diaspora

Queering the Global Filipina Body: Contested Nationalism in the Filipina/o Diaspora

The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas by Jennifer Scheper Hughes

Reviewed by: The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas by Jennifer Scheper Hughes Erik R. Seeman Jennifer Scheper Hughes, The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 2021) Jennifer Scheper Hughes breathes new life into an important topic: the relationship between the devastating toll of disease on Indigenous communities in sixteenth-century Mexico and the Christian affiliation of many Native Mexicans in that same time span. Readers of this journal will be most impressed by Hughes's theological readings of her primary sources. Though she does not sustain some of her claims, Hughes succeeds in categorizing colonial Catholicism as a church of the dead. Hughes focuses on an epidemic that began in 1576 and lasted roughly five years. The epidemic is not well-known outside specialist circles, perhaps because the disease itself remains unidentified. Marked by grim symptoms, including hemorrhages from the nose, the disease may have been caused by the bacterium Salmonella enterica, Hughes speculates (13). Instead of getting bogged down in medical guesswork, Hughes wisely refers to the illness by its Nahuatl name: cocoliztli. The 1576 epidemic caused such widespread death that Spanish observers defined the period as one marked by mortandad, which can be translated as "mortality," but which also connotes "carnage" and "slaughter" (16). Faced with this mortandad and the demise of so many Indigenous Christians, some missionaries despaired for the future of the Mexican Church. Hughes analyzes this [End Page 116] moment of despair with great sensitivity, focusing on (but not limiting herself to) 135 unpublished missionary letters written from 1576 to 1581. Relying on these sources, Hughes argues that Mexican Catholicism became a church of the dead, meaning that "every aspect of [it] was in some way defined by or responsive to the fact of cataclysmic death" (99). When describing the church of the dead, Hughes uses language that sometimes seems hyperbolic, as when she states that this "spectral church" was an "ecclesial body absent of living persons" (95). In other places, her poetic writing suggests that such characterizations are not meant to be taken literally but are rather attempts to describe the essence or spirit of colonial Mexican Catholicism: the church "breathed in death; it exhaled death; it dwelled in death" (99). Hughes supports these claims in four vigorously analytical chapters. The first focuses on the intimate bodily and spiritual care missionaries offered sick Natives. Serving as healers, priests infused their ministrations with theological significance. Healing was "a religious rite"; indeed, it was "a kind of sacrament" that helped "transform Indigenous bodies into Christian flesh" (37–38). Unlike in English North America, where (following Joyce Chaplin's interpretation) Native susceptibility to illness led colonists to believe in their own racial superiority, missionary encounters with Native illness in Mexico led to "the mystical incorporation of Indigenous persons into a larger, encompassing Christian body" (39). Chapter two continues the analysis of Indigenous bodies, emphasizing their relation to the corpus mysticum, a medieval phrase that conjures both the mystical body of the church and the literal flesh of Christ. Even as missionaries incorporated Indigenous bodies into the colonial corpus mysticum, the mortandad threatened that project: the mystical body was "injured and at risk" (66). To remedy this, priests turned to the healing power of blood. They urged Indigenous Catholics to shed their own blood in scourging penitential processions, and they performed bloodletting on their dying Native parishioners. The result was not racial othering but mystical union: Mexico's sanguinary theology "was often more about assimilating and erasing difference than about drawing ever sharper lines of division and distinction" (84). The next two chapters take spatial relations as their organizing principle: the third from the perspective of the missionaries, and the fourth based on Indigenous sources. Whereas the mortandad led some priests to fear that the Mexican church was failing, others took up the challenge of ministering to a dying population. To do so, Archbishop Pedro Moya de Contreras walked 800 leagues (perhaps some 2,000 miles). According to Hughes, Moya and other missionaries "resanctified the landscape by walking" (106), expanding the...

The Whiteness of the White

The Whiteness of the White

Locating Female Transgression against Heteronormative Society: A Comparative Study of Three African American Novels

The study attempts to locate female transgressions against a racist and homophobic society as portrayed by Ann Allen Shockley, Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor in their novels Loving Her (1974), The Color Purple (1982) and The Women of Brewster Place (1983), respectively. It applies the content-analysis method, lesbian feminist theory and intersectionality to explore the black women characters’ defiance of hetero-patriarchal culture. The novelists effectively challenge heterosexism, and advocate women’s solidarity and lesbian sexuality as acts of resistance to regulative sexual norms. The theoretical tools compare and analyse how different categorisations of race and sex are interwoven in the novels and how their intersection hinders lesbian relations and women’s solidarity. The commonality of the black lesbian characters lies in their experience of sexualised aggression as well as racial otherness. Walker’s characters, unlike Shockley’s and Naylor’s, powerfully threaten sexist, racist and homophobic society and promote universal sisterhood.

Islam, Blackness, and African Cultural Distinction: The Islamic Négritude of Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse

Abstract Ideas of African cultural or racial distinction, most notably Négritude, largely have been dismissed as marginal to “ordinary” Africans, or the vast majority who did not have the opportunity to study in Paris or London and meet with ideologues of Black nationalism from the diaspora. Sub-Saharan African Muslims earlier responded to a process of racial othering, particularly in response to the prejudice of some Arab coreligionists. Even if Black African Muslims were reacting to decidedly different circumstances than African Americans or Black West Indians studying in Europe, Muslim articulations of Black cultural identity in the twentieth century successfully pivoted to the new historical discourse, both apprising and contributing to the discourse on Africaniteé emerging from the diaspora. This study considers the engagement with the question of Black racial identity by the prominent Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse (1900–1975).

Psychology as a site for decolonial analysis

AbstractThis article provides a conceptual introduction to the second installment of a two‐issue collection of work on decolonial approaches to the psychological study of social issues. Whereas papers in the first installment consider decoloniality as a social issue for psychological study, papers in this second installment consider psychology as a site for decolonial analysis. In this article, we briefly review key concepts from decolonial theory (e.g., the coloniality of modernity, distinct from historical colonialism). We then discuss manifestations of epistemic violence in hegemonic psychology that require intervention. Epistemic violence is (not merely) a matter of epistemic exclusion of racialized others from the knowledge production process, imperialist imposition of white‐washed knowledge products as universal standards without regard to context, or pathologizing forms of explanation that construct racial others as deviants in light of white‐washed standards (i.e., epistemological violence; Teo, 2010). In addition, epistemic violence in psychology includes forms of harm (e.g., zero‐point epistemology and individualist lifeways) associated with its modern/colonial roots. Accordingly, a decolonial approach to the psychological study of social issues may require refusal of the discipline of psychology.

Validating and testing a measure of anti‐semitism on support for QAnon and vote intention for Trump in 2020

AbstractObjectiveKnowledge on anti‐semitism and its effects as an attitude is limited. We seek to assess its relationship with other out‐group measures and its predictive ability on political judgments. We seek to (a) study the properties of a measure of anti‐semitism; (b) explore the relationship between anti‐semitism and other frequently used measures of out‐group attitudes; (c) assess the key demographic predictors of endorsement of anti‐semitic beliefs; (d) evaluate the predictive ability of our measure of anti‐semitism in models predicting support for the QAnon conspiracy theory and vote for Trump in the 2020 election.Data and MethodsThis study utilizes two national online surveys fielded in January and August 2020 that are weighted to match the U.S. population. We utilize a Bayesian factor analytic approach to assess the relationship between various out‐group measures. We also use regression analyses to predict the correlates of anti‐semitism and to test the relationship between anti‐semitism and support for QAnon and for Trump.ResultsOur results show that anti‐semitism shares more variance with xenophobia than anti‐black prejudice suggesting that people tend to perceive Jews as national outsiders not as racial others. Furthermore, anti‐semitism is a strong positive predictor of both support for QAnon and intent to vote for Donald Trump.

코로나19 팬데믹과 아시아라는 스타일

The anti-Asian racism that has manifested during the coronavirus pandemic recalls the long history of Asian racialization. It recalls the ways in which Asians have been imagined as a doubled figure to bear both racial otherness and historical transformation. The anti-Asian racism also hearkens back to the liminal space inhabited by the Asian body, a precarious position between human and inhuman. The Asian body exists as a sign, not an entity, on which a series of epidermal racial markers appear and onto which all the anxieties around the virus are projected in the displaced form of hate. As an anthropomorphized form for this pandemic’s complex relation to human life, the Asiatic figure becomes a synecdoche for the unprecedented crisis in its retention of these old racial markers. Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) stages this blurred line in the category of race between discrimination (difference) and indiscrimination (identity) through the adventure of a “tiny” Asian girl, Fan. Analyzing the way in which Lee delves into Fan’s unique animacy, this paper argues that On Such a Full Sea stylizes the figure of Asia in two ways. First, the writer coordinates, both in the text’s form and content, the unique feature of Asian racialization in which the Asiatic figure is imagined as an emblem of crisis. Second, through Fan’s movement and its impact upon other characters, Lee also renders the style as a mode of response to affective disturbances of the present and thereby shapes Fan as an embodiment of the crisis style.

The Legacies of Empire in Nwaubani's I Do Not Come to You by Chance and Mengestu's All Our Names

Abstract While the Black Lives Matter movement is widely recognized and supported in Africa, its framing prioritizes experiences of anti-Blackness in the United States and the Black diaspora. This is partly owing to the movement's genesis as a direct response to domestic forms of anti-Blackness, including police brutality, disproportionate Black incarceration, and systemic inequalities, but also because, as Jemima Pierre argues, Africa is often perceived as “the site of racial otherness,” making engagements with racialization in Africa appear redundant. This paper considers how two contemporary African writers—Nigerian Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani and Ethiopian American Dinaw Mengestu—comment on anti-Blackness in Africa. This article views Nwaubani's I Do Not Come to You by Chance and Mengestu's All Our Names as using trickster figures to critique the racially inflected narratives of modernity, Euro-American imperialism, and neoliberal capital in Africa. In the process, they invite us to join the dots between domestic patterns of anti-Black violence in the Black diaspora and Euro-American destruction of African lives through the debilitating systems of slavery, colonialism, the Cold War, and neoliberal capital in Africa. The two novels’ portraits challenge the Black Lives Matter movement's thin engagement with anti-Blackness in Africa by demonstrating how historic and ongoing dehumanization of Africans serves to normalize similar dehumanization of Afro-descended people across the globe.