Racial Others Research Articles

Religion in an Age of Empire: The Salvation Army and British Imperialism, 1878–1914

Debates about the British Empire continue to rage, especially those concerned with its impact on domestic affairs during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. The degree to which empire mattered to average Britons at home has tended to generate polarised responses from historians. Some have sought to downplay its overall significance, whereas others have been prone to argue that its effects on society were widespread. The present article speaks into this debate by examining one notable British organisation — the Salvation Army — which came into being in the second half of the nineteenth century. While a number of scholars have addressed the imperialist implications of Army work in the colonies, much less work has been done to scrutinise the empire's influence on Salvationists within Britain itself. Looking at three characteristics frequently associated with imperialist ideology — militarism, racial othering, and devotion to the monarchy — this article contends that the Salvation Army's relationship to the British Empire was remarkably dynamic and complex during the timeframe under review. Demonstrating that Salvationist thinking and practice could both help and hinder the aims of imperialism, it points to the need for more balanced and nuanced approaches to the study of the empire in the metropole.

Orientalism in D. H. Lawrence’s Novelistic Representation of Italy

ABSTRACT Critical attention to D. H. Lawrence’s two Italian novels has focused on themes of sexual politics and leadership politics, and few critics have noted their engagement with colonial politics. Informed by postcolonial studies, this paper argues that Lawrence’s representation of Italy in The Lost Girl and Aaron's Rod is overloaded with Orientalist imagery in that Italy is imagined as an Other within Europe that contrasts with the industrialised and civilised North. Italy is portrayed as alternatively redemptive and destructive. While the Italian landscape is idealised as an exotic Other, its people and culture are demonised as a savage Other. Both representation modes are trapped in the logic of imperialist discourses. The celebration of the landscape marginalises Italy from the modern world and the demonisation of the community affirms the racial and cultural inferiority of Italy. Lawrence’s representation of Italy indicates that in the cultural imagination of Britain the racial and national others within Europe are often subject to the colonising gaze of the ‘imperial eyes’.

Messianic Fulfillments: Staging Indigenous Salvation in America

In Messianic Fulfillments, Hayes Peter Mauro combines art history, religious studies, and Native American history to examine four strains of evangelical Christian visual and textual representations of Native Americans, from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Each chapter covers a particular group: Puritans, Quakers, Mormons, and progressive Social Gospel Christians. Mauro walks the reader through forty-six illustrations (paintings, lithographs, engravings, life masks, and photographs), explaining the artists’ training, backgrounds, and composition choices, along with the reception and provenance of their works. He discusses the visual languages of the artists and especially their “chromatic metaphors,” which not only helped solidify racial categories but also granted them spiritual meaning (213). Because the small illustrations are black and white, the reader must find larger color illustrations to do his explanations justice. The section on Mormons curiously relies on twenty-first century reproductions of nineteenth century works. Mauro focuses on the depictions of the conversion processes, arguing that “the ‘deviant’ Indian and the ‘normative’ Anglo were polarizing constructs that were metaphorically staged in image and text and especially in material culture” (2). These traditions all “advocate[d] forms of Christian American triumphalism” (5), and many within these traditions made “‘empirical’ claims that such physiological racial distinctions had a direct correlation with intellectual and moral capacities as well as a relative need for Christian salvation” (7).His definition of “evangelical Christianity” emphasizes evangelism—that is, conversion efforts—but not evangelicals’ privileging of biblical authority. Latter-Day Saints, due to their addition of the Book of Mormon to the body of scripture, would usually be excluded from most definitions of that phrase. While some Quakers took steps toward evangelicalism in the nineteenth century, many Quakers did not. While these denominations may fall under a very broad definition of “evangelical Christians,” the emphasis on these groups means that many prominent evangelical missionary groups are excluded from discussion. Within his description of Calvinism, some readers may find his close association of “works” with salvation among the Puritans unsettling. To most Puritans, fulfillment of the law and completing one’s calling through work were outward manifestations of a justification that an individual has little role in—salvation was the work of God alone. His analysis of New England’s visual compositions is more convincing, especially in terms of Puritans as inspirational subjects for Second Great Awakening artwork and its celebration and reinterpretation of John Eliot’s evangelism.The chapter on Quakers explores the art of Benjamin West, Edward Hicks, and others. Quaker artists idealized Native American–Quaker interactions but tended to “depict encounters between Quaker exemplars and racial Others” and tied their religious conversion to their full inclusion in the emerging market economy (63). Academically trained Mormon artists used their conventions to convey the subjugated place of racial Others, especially Lamanites (ancestors of Native Americans), in the Mormon worldview. To early Mormons, this helped justify violence against Utes and Paiutes who resisted the invaders of their Utah homelands. Mauro interprets Social Gospel Christianity as the inheritor of earlier evangelical trends and argues that the Hampton and Carlisle Institutes manifested Social Gospel evangelicalism. The transformation of “Others” into commercial and industrious people who would resemble Euro-Americans to the extent possible was all part of their salvation, though their racial distinctiveness was always emphasized in the institutions’ staged photographs.In his analysis of specific works, and the visual traditions they reflected, Mauro’s analysis of composition, chromatic metaphors, and artists’ racial assertions will be instructive to ethnohistorians, anthropologists, text-based historians, and art historians.

Race, nose, truth: dystopian odours of the Other in American antebellum consciousness

ABSTRACT It was in 1835, in the wake of the Nullification Crisis that shook the United States with the threat of civil war over federal law, state’s rights and the Slave Power, that Jerome Holgate, under the pseudonym ‘Oliver Bolokitten’, published his dystopian fiction A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation. It posited the existence of an African body smell that would make anti-odour machines essential if American societies fell prey to the potential ravages of racial miscegenation. Two decades after Holgate offered his dystopian world-view of smell and race, ‘Cephas Broadluck’, a pseudonym for the American author Allen Gazlay, published Races of Mankind: With Travels in Grubland (1856), an allegorical attack on comparable forms of sensory and sexual ‘amalgamation’, also proposing olfactory detection as a racial protection for the white body politic. The antebellum era dystopias of Holgate and Gazlay combined ideas of truth and race through the sensory experiences of the nose, which had previously been socially conditioned to sense racial Others through a false consciousness about the smell of Africans throughout the Atlantic World. Despite the efforts of academics to deconstruct such absurd beliefs and experiences in the modern world, olfactory racism continues in the languages of both current political leaders and within the bowels of the Internet. Because these prejudicial perceptions continue through what seems for many racists to be biological experiences of truth, scholars must focus much more on analysing embodied perceptions of Othering if academic arguments about the social construction of race are to make any inroads against the return of racist, technologized and fascist modernity in the contemporary West.

Defending Privilege: Rights, Status, and Legal Peril in the British Novel by Nicole Mansfield Wright

Reviewed by: Defending Privilege: Rights, Status, and Legal Peril in the British Novel by Nicole Mansfield Wright Anne Frey (bio) Nicole Mansfield Wright. Defending Privilege: Rights, Status, and Legal Peril in the British Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Pp. 224. $94.95 hardcover; $34.95 paperback. In changing the way we narrate the history of novels, social class, and reform, Nicole Mansfield Wright's Defending Privilege provides a timely and illuminating read. Wright argues that conservative novelists of the Romantic century (1750–1850) use the language of rights, reform, and victimization that we often associate with humanitarian appeals to defend instead the legal and economic status of the privileged. In chapters focused on Tobias Smollett, Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, and on anonymous and pseudonymous pro-slavery novels, and with significant research into Romantic-era debates over legal access, Wright demonstrates that even writers who call for reform often limit and condition how and whether the lower classes and racial others find justice. The novelists that Wright discusses identify flaws in the legal system. However, they protest these flaws when downtrodden members of the upper class are the system's "victims," and they critique as upstarts the middle-class lawyers who attempt to infiltrate high society. Smollett (in his less-discussed mid-career novels Ferdinand Count Fathom and Sir Lancelot Greaves and his comic drama The Reprisal) recommends a two-tier legal system, in which legal consequences are reduced for deserving upper-class citizens; he will admit foreigners into the ranks of these privileged beneficiaries, but only if they demonstrate the requisite manners, education, and ability to contribute to the community. When Charlotte Smith complains about women's inability to represent themselves in the courts, she does so with the aim of regaining for herself and her children the upper-class status into which she was born. Walter Scott argues for the importance of providing legal representation for the lower classes, but with the intent that educated advocates should filter the demands and frivolous claims with which he assumes lowly individuals would otherwise clog the justice system. And pro-slavery novels argue that enslaved blacks should be able to testify in cases against whites, but only [End Page 113] when the black individuals are trustworthy and emotionally transparent, and only with the goal that loyal blacks will report on disloyal slaves and Methodist ministers who attempt to stir revolt. In all of these cases, novelists note injustices in the legal system, but trust that benevolent authority figures will adjust problematic practices just enough to reward those deemed unjustly deprived, without changing the system as a whole. Wright's approach is especially convincing because she grounds her law-and-literature scholarship in a well-researched history of changing legal practices and of specific legal and legislative battles over what she terms legal agency, the question of who could speak in and through the courts. Scott's discussion of legal representation, for example, looks ahead to the 1836 English Prisoners' Counsel Act, which provided advocates for defendants but required those defendants to stay silent. And Charlotte Smith, Wright demonstrates, complains specifically and accurately about the way in which the escalating costs of legal representation increasingly reserve legal access for the well-to-do. In a welcome contribution to Smith scholarship, Wright argues that Smith's novels (including Emmeline, The Old Manor House, and Marchmont) and her selections and translations of French real-life legal stories, the pitavals, incorporate "didactic primers in the guise of sentimental romances"; Smith portrays male and female characters interacting with the law to show female readers how to deal with specific legal situations "from refusing a request for a warrantless search of one's home to negotiating the fees of legal counsel" (56, 60). But Smith writes her "field guide to an exploitative legal system" to help individuals like herself, poor descendants of upper-class families (80). The readings in Defending Privilege are also impressive when attending to how the form of the novel works with and against an author's conservative aims. Wright's reading of Scott's Redgauntlet is especially ingenious in arguing that Scott's sections in epistolary form (a form that had widely...

On the Politics of Decadent Rebellion: Beardsley, Japonisme, Rococo

The graphic designer Aubrey Beardsley created perverse, grotesque illustrations that encapsulate our sense of decadent visuality. This essay explores Beardsley's use of foreign styles, specifically those of nineteenth-century Japan and eighteenth-century France. Looking at Beardsley's illustrations for Salomé (1893) and The Rape of the Lock (1895), the essay argues that the Japanese and French stylistic influences are actually connected, despite their diverse geographies and temporalities. Studying both styles together reveals the ways that decadence embraced hierarchy and the inequality of persons, wielding a surprisingly normative politics of racial and cultural otherness to produce a Victorian counterculture. Decadence harnessed these familiar imperial-era attitudes in strange ways, using models of taboo difference to create a transgressive aesthetics that moved toward both embodiment and abstraction.

EMANCIPATION IN THE AMERICAN ARTISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE XIX CENTURY

This article is devoted to the research of discourse of emancipation in American artistic consciousness on examples of abolitionist novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe and painting images of XIX century. The topicality of the research is due to insufficient study in Ukrainian philosophy of the ideas of abolitionism and the emancipation of black Americans through the prism of literary images, especially painting images. Among the research tasks are: to analyze topics of slavery and emancipation, ways of representation of racist and abolitionist ideology in the novel’s plot and artistic images; to analyze types of images of “blacks” in literature and painting. Novelty of work is in the reconstruction of emancipation discourse, which confronts with discourse of racism and black Americans’ discrimination in the American literature (on the example of Beecher Stowe’s novel) and in painting images of XIX century. The novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe became a bestseller in Europe and America, the symbol of revolution, it stirred up people’s consciousness in many countries which used different forms of dependency and obligation during XIX – XX century, and later it entered the list of classics of children’s literature. Using the novel as an example, the author shows that the two opposite discourses – colonial (slavery) and anti-colonial (emancipation) are the basis of the controversy of the protagonists, which reflects the social and political controversy over the position and status of black Americans. Ideas of women’s emancipation from gender, social and labor oppression are reflected in the images of black slave women, and in the XX century they became the ideological basis of “black feminism”. Using examples of the novel and painting, the author examines racial and gender stereotypes, the problem of the relationship between “white” and “black”, the problem of preserving the family and women’s resistance to male domination in conditions of slavery, the problem of the formation of national identity in America after the abolition of slavery. The author analyzes the plots in European and American painting, which reflect not only “colonial” images where black Americans are represented as racial and cultural Others, but also “emancipation” images, which symbolically state the resistance to slavery or confirm the subject’s freedom. It is researched in the article that the active development of the emancipation topic in the artistic consciousness shows the change of social status of racial Others in the public consciousness of the XIX century, which was the result of abolitionist and women’s movements for minority rights in America.

Posthumanism and Colonial Discourse: Nineteenth Century Literature and Twenty-First Century Critique

Nineteenth Century novelists frequently picture life beyond and across the edges of humanity—figuratively moving the ‘posts’ of humanity—a practice that this article calls ‘posthumanisation’. Inspired by the accelerating as well as mutually reinforcing dynamics of colonial expansion, empiricism, new biological and scientific findings (Darwin, paleontology, and psychology), and the rise of industrialisation, prominent writers such as Mary Shelley, the Bronte sisters, and Joseph Conrad habitually blur human-animal boundaries. This article engages with versions of posthumanisation in selected novels by these authors—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1898)—and the anonymously published The Woman of Colour (1808), examining how they engage either in critiquing the perfidious overlaps between posthumanisation and colonial discourse (The Woman of Colour; Frankenstein) or blur Cartesian binaries between humans and animals to reinforce colonialism’s narcissistic politics of non-relation (for example, seeGandhi, 2006;Simmons, 2007; andDrichel, 2018). The article foregrounds the extent to which a thriving colonial discourse and biological racism do not (necessarily) result in a ‘fixing’ of racial others on the side of ‘animal’ (and, as such, in their ‘dehumanisation’), but rather in a strategic ‘flexibilisation’ of ‘hum-animality’ (seeEllis, 2018) in the interest of plausibilising white supremacy and the slavery system. Arguing for the merit of historicizing literary analysis as posthumanist scholarship directs its gaze to the past; building on race-critical contributions to posthumanist discourse (see, for example,Malm and Hornborg, 2014;Jackson, 2015;Jackson, 2020;Davis et al., 2019; and Yussof, 2019); and also engaging with the still-scarce scholarship on the overlaps of posthuman being and race relations in the context of Britain’s ‘imperial century’ (seeEllis, 2018; andJackson, 2020), this essay contributes to setting on a more solid, historical foundation a discourse that has repeatedly been criticised for engaging a ‘racial’ ‘wilful blindness’ (Yusoff, 2018). The article thus contributes to diversifying not only historical approaches to ‘proto-posthumanisms’ as they are currently proliferating in the field but also, and by implication, current posthumanist self-understandings and research ethics.

Versklavte Replikanten und die Konstruktion von »Whiteness« in Blade Runner und Blade Runner 2049

The release of the anticipated sequel to Blade Runner and the largely unaltered adoption of the spatial and discursive setting in Blade Runner 2049 gave newfound relevance to the topic of the Whiteness of the enslaved replicants. Because Blade Runner positions the enslaved replicants in a discursive framework that repeatedly references African American history and slave narratives, their hyperbolically white depiction has caused concern and criticism among Anglophone scholars. This essay examines the construction of Whiteness in Blade Runner and discursive differences in the sequel Blade Runner 2049 from the perspective of Critical Race Theory, based mainly on the theoretical groundwork of Richard Dyer and Daniel Bernardi. It will outline the construction of whiteness as a means to critically portray the oppressive discourse in both films, by discussing the detachment of the replicants »invisible privileges« of whiteness. In order to appropriately characterize the, on its face very questionable, positioning of enslaved white replicants within a framework of African American slavery, the analysis will establish how both films utilize whiteness to construct a critical depiction of the historically stereotypical connection between blackness and slavery. The epitome of this criticism is to be found in the hyperbolically white stylization of Roy Batty. The depiction of »White Flight« in Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 will be discussed against the backdrop of racial Othering. The implied migration of white humans to the superior »Off-World« establishes a fear of the Other and its assimilation in the white population. The exclusion of black characters in the original film, and their inclusion in the sequel, affect the way in which the movie portrays replicants within the framework of African American enslavement. Along with the distinct non-hyperbolic depiction of the white replicants in Blade Runner 2049, this necessitates an analysis of the perpetuation of the oppressive discourse. This essay aims to establish the analytical fertility of Critical Whiteness Studies within the Germanophone Blade Runner debate.

Race, Celebrity and Fashion: Anna May Wong in Spanish Magazines of the 1930s

Anna May Wong was the most widely known Asian American film actress of her generation, achieving unprecedented success in the Hollywood and European industry. When she traveled to Spain in 1935 to perform at the Teatro Casablanca in Madrid, she was already an international star and her visit garnered extensive coverage from the Spanish press, particularly film magazines of the period. These magazines provided their largely female readership with access to Hollywood stars such as Wong, whose celebrity was the site of complex negotiations of race, ethnicity and citizenship in the United States and Europe during the 1930s. Publications such as Cinegramas and Popular Film represented Wong for Spanish readers who, although removed from the particularities of race politics in the United States, were nevertheless intrigued by her ‘exotic allure’, positioned as she was at the intersection of racial otherness and Hollywood glamour. By reading Wong in Spanish magazines from the 1930s, this article considers how Spanish readers might have used these representations as a tool for negotiating their own identities as cosmopolitan at a moment when Spain was often perceived as existing on the cultural margins of Western Europe.

“Policing Borders”: Extermination and Relocation of Insects in Three South African Texts

Summary Borders between states are spaces of aggression and anxiety about ownership, inclusion, exclusion and group identity, and they are often reinforced by shows of force that can yield to violence. Apartheid in South Africa was primarily and explicitly an attempt at controlling who could occupy space. The erection and maintenance of borders within the country, between spaces, became more aggressive and rigid as the era progressed and it became apparent that the Nationalist dream of racially pure spaces was not going to be feasible. Since the transition to democracy in 1994, borders have remained contested since different areas have continued to be apportioned, albeit informally, for different racial groups. Confident assertions of white supremacy yield to anxiety and even paranoia when owners feel that their borders are not secure. In this article, I explore the use of monstrous insect imagery in three post- transitional South African texts − The Ugly NooNoo (Buckland & Kani, 1994); District 9 (dir. Blomkamp, 2009) and Nineveh (Rose-Innes, 2011). In each of these texts, insects serve as metaphors for aggressive border-crossing by racial others, who are figured as undesirable and myriad.

“No, just an alien”: disability, sexuality, and the extraterrestrial in Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Interface”

In this article, we read the Borderlands poem, “Interface,” about a relationship between the speaker and an extraterrestrial being named Leyla. For Gloria Anzaldúa, the extraterrestrial foregrounds the spiritual, linguistic, gender, racial, and ethnic otherness that are key features of her works. Through an embrace of the alien, Leyla, Anzaldúa refuses to treat such categories as neatly separated or truly knowable. The poem’s narrator vacillates between instructing her lover in the ways of human norms and celebrating her unique alienness. This back and forth reflects Anzaldúa’s own statements about sexuality and disability. In our reading of the poetics of “Interface,” the extraterrestrial extends our understanding of how and why disability, a fraught category for the author, is essential to her body of work. The figure of the alien engages the lived realities of queerness and disability, and challenges readers to reconsider human connection, capacity, and intelligibility. Counter to phobic representations, human-alien encounters produce knowledge, erotic pleasure, and companionship in Anzaldúa’s world. Leyla’s trajectory in the poem offers an entrada into her life as a misfit - vulnerable and powerful, apprenticing in the ways of humans while refusing to fully conform to our norms. Through its form and content, the poem provides an account of a struggle with a desire for alien difference and pressures to conform as Leyla becomes embodied.

Submerged for Some? Government Visibility, Race, and American Political Trust

Scholarship concerning American government visibility has focused on the state’s growing submergence, yet these accounts contrast with racial and ethnic politics research focusing on the American state’s conspicuousness in the lives of people of color. Attending to this disconnect, I ask how government visibility varies across racial groups. Combining interviews and quantitative analysis within a policy feedback framework, I argue that five public policy trends have created a racial split in the American state’s visibility. For whites, submerged state policies have grown alongside the rising visibility of racialized poverty policies and taxation. As a result, whites are less aware of how government benefits them and more aware of how government uses tax dollars to fund programs perceived as solely benefitting racial others. For people of color, the decline of civil rights legislation has contrasted with criminal legal policies that have made the criminal legal system a uniquely visible manifestation of government in their lives. To demonstrate the political importance of this racial divide, I uncover a racial heterogeneity in people’s political trust attachments, wherein white trust is connected to welfare attitudes, while trust among people of color is associated with feelings about the police.

Whiteness and the Psychoanalytic Imagination

In this essay I seek to interrogate the specialized language of psychoanalysis and the implicit role unexamined racialization—and hence White hegemony—play in the American psychoanalytic imagination. I begin with a discussion of Eng & Han writing on racial melancholia, a work that offers a thoughtful exposition of the power of Whiteness to induce racial melancholia in its “Others.” I then turn the inquiry toward my own life story, seeking to illuminate the role of Whiteness and racial othering in my own racial formation. Given our field’s core interest in subject formation, notions of racialization and the dominant discourses of Whiteness would appear to be ideal grist for the mill of psychoanalysis. This could only be true, however, if psychoanalysis were self-reflexive about the dynamics of race and the hegemony of Whiteness in U.S. society. There is considerable literature suggesting that psychoanalysis may embody potential for such critical work. However, because the theory and practices of conventional psychoanalysis are racialized through and through, psychoanalysts—as currently trained—are ill-equipped to address the hegemony of Whiteness or the dynamics of racial difference. If, as Claudia Tate suggests, psychoanalysis functions “as a writing of the ethnicity of the White western psyche,” we have much work to do to unconceal these processes and work toward a more emancipatory and inclusive psychoanalysis.

Constructing Health: Representations of Health and Housing in Charlottesville’s Urban Renewals

This essay explores the co-construction of urban health and blight through architectural representation during urban renewal, exploring how buildings symbolically stood for social and epidemiological diagnoses, producing racial othering through depictions of space. Analysis of photographs, building surveys, real estate appraisals, maps, reports, and advertisements preceding urban renewal in Charlottesville, Virginia, reveals a racialized gaze that constructed problematic associations of whiteness with health and Blackness with blight. We argue that racialized image-making practices perpetuated inequities that urban renewal policy purported to reconcile while masking the true generating dynamics of white neglect and wealth extraction.

Neither Fish nor Fowl: Locating Identity in the Gap between Race and Culture

This article discusses the author’s experience of growing up in 1970s rural America as a person of Chinese descent in a predominantly White and Latinx community. The author, the daughter of American-born Chinese parents, examines the dichotomy between race and culture and its impact on her sense of self and clinical work. Drawing from personal encounters and observations, the author examines the lived experience of tokenism and of negotiating explicit and implicit boundaries surrounding racial and cultural expectations and stereotypes. The article also explores America’s immigration policies and history of racial exclusion, and how these historical realities impacted her family narrative and American identity. The author contemplates how her childhood experience of inclusion and exclusion continues to shape her perception of racial and cultural otherness.

White ignorance, race, and feminist politics in Sweden

ABSTRACT This article discusses the Swedish government’s policy document on a feminist policy to reduce and prevent men’s violence against women. Permeated by racial ignorance and politics of difference this document systematically and consistently excludes and ignores racial and ethnic power structures and their consequences in migrant minorities’ daily lives and experience. The article raises questions about why some knowledge is silenced or abandoned while some is embraced and encouraged. Within a wider intersectional framework, and through critical race theory and ignorance studies, it investigates the knowledge produced in the government document and the way it reproduces, maintains, and normalizes racial otherness and social exclusion.

Ethnomusicology beyond #MeToo: Listening for the Violences of the Field

AbstractResponding to an increasing sense of urgency about sexual harassment and assault during ethnographic fieldwork in the era of #MeToo, this article offers a lesson plan for effecting systemic change in the discipline of ethnomusicology. We show how disciplinary assumptions about the field where harassment occurs reify colonizing histories of racial othering, reinscribe heteronormativity, and alternately conflate or erase specific types of violences. We identify feminist scholarly genealogies that provide alternate models for theorizing in and through personal experience. We argue that this analytical work cannot and must not be absent from the important questions of how we practically approach and prepare students for fieldwork in ethnomusicology.

“Because the World Consists of Everybody”: Understanding Parents’ Preferences for Neighborhood Diversity

Previous research, primarily using survey data, highlights preferences about neighborhood racial composition as a potential contributor to residential segregation. However, we know little about how individuals, especially parents, understand neighborhood racial composition. We examine this question using in–depth interview data from a racially diverse sample of 156 parents of young children in two metropolitan areas. Prior scholarship on neighborhood racial preferences has mostly been animated by expectations about in–group attraction, out–group avoidance, the influence of stereotypes, and perceived associations between race and status. However, we find that a substantial subset of parents expressed a desire for racially and ethnically mixed neighborhoods—a residential preference at odds with racial segregation. Parents across race conceptualized neighborhood diversity as beneficial for children's development. They expressed shared logics, reasoning that neighborhood diversity cultivates skills and comfort interacting with racial others; teaches tolerance; and provides cultural enrichment. However, these ideas intersected with racial segregation and stratification to shape parents’ understandings of diversity and hinder the realization of parents’ aspirations. Beliefs about the benefits of neighborhood diversity were rarely a primary motivation for residential choices. Nonetheless, parents’ perceptions of the advantages of neighborhood racial mixing reveal the reach of discourse on the value of diversity and suggest a potential opportunity to advance residential desegregation.

White anxiety in (post)apartheid South Africa

Robin DiAngelo’s influential concept of white fragility, while certainly suggestive and critically useful, does not go far enough in accounting for three central aspects of white anxiety as it occurs in the (post-)apartheid South African context. Utilizing Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to sketch a rudimentary paradigm of anxiety, and focusing on textual examples drawn from (post-)apartheid popular culture – including the work of Rian Malan and Neil Blomkamp’s 2009 film District 9 – this paper opens up a series of distinct perspectives on (post-)apartheid whiteness. Departing from the construct of white fragility – which is less destabilizing, less dynamic, and less attentive to the dimension of fantasy than is the notion of white anxiety – it offers instead a Lacanian psychoanalytic conceptualization of white anxiety. One implication of such a reading is that, beneath the racist defensiveness of post-apartheid whiteness, an ambiguous mode of unconscious identification racial otherness might indeed be at play.