Racial Paradigm Research Articles

하드보일드 추리소설의 인종적 변용—월터 모즐리의 이지 롤린스 연작을 중심으로

This paper aims to closely examine the racial transformation of the traditional hard-boiled detective fiction in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series. Although Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series makes use of genre conventions of hard-boiled detective novels (such as displaying a pessimistic view of the world or introducing independent detectives), it establishes a new paradigm of race and criminality that goes against the tradition. While the ruling class is represented as the root of social evil in hard-boiled detective fiction, racism is the cause of social oppression and political corruption in the Easy Rawlins Series. When the hard-boiled detective is able to maintain absolute independence, Mosley's detective has to compromise with governmental authority due to his racial position. Whereas the hard-boiled detective novels define blackness as criminality, whiteness embodies criminality in the Easy Rawlins Series. This paper concludes that, unlike the traditional hard-boiled detective fiction which reaffirms racial hierarchies, Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series presents a radically different type of hard-boiled detective novel which challenges the dominant structural ideologies of race.

Centenary Paper: Living Hell: The Chinese Coolie Trade in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Between 1847 and 1874, approximately 150,000 Chinese were brought to Cuba under termed contracts to fulfil a labour shortage on sugar cane plantations. Known as ‘coolies’, they suffered harsh conditions and were treated severely. Coolies were generally viewed as dutiful and submissive and their voices have largely been confined to the margins of literature and history. However, the nineteenth-century testimonies and illustrations of Chinese coolies denounce the savagery and cruelty of the Spanish overseers, while simultaneously revealing that coolies were not passive victims. The coolies demonstrated agency, courage and strategic resistance in the act of migrating, in their words, and rebellions. Coolie labour played a major role in reshaping Cuba’s sugar economy and its existing systems of production. In addition, the amplified presence of the Chinese in Cuba challenged existing paradigms of race and nation. Cuban society was no longer Black and white. The growing Chinese population forced a reconsideration of this traditional binary vision of society and, in the formation of a new Chinese–Cuban identity, complicated notions of what constituted cubanidad.

Racial Rage, Racial Guilt: The Uses of Anger in Asian America

ABSTRACT Asian Americans are conventionally described as “middle-man minorities,” outside of dominant racial paradigms of White and Black, adjunct to White privilege and exempt from the brunt of systemic violence directed against Black people. Historical accounts of the in-betweenness of Asian Americans trace their origins to how Asian coolie labor has served to triangulate White capital and African slavery over the course of European modernity. If this is the material history of in-betweenness, what is the psychic corollary of the middle-man thesis? Through an analysis of the Netflix dark comedy series Beef, as well as case histories of Asian American patients and students, we argue that the psychic effects of occupying a racially intermediate position implicate an unexplored terrain of racial rage and racial guilt that Asian Americans are insistently socialized to hold on behalf of others.

Deconstructing Racial Paradigms in Criminology: Towards an Inclusive and Critical Approach

This paper critiques the conventional frameworks in criminological research regarding race and racism. It identifies the limitations of data-driven methods that often perpetuate racial stereotypes due to biased and incomplete data. The study argues that criminology has historically minimized the role of race, treating it as a mere variable and neglecting the broader socio-political contexts. This oversight leads to color-blind racism, which ignores systemic inequalities and fails to account for the lived experiences of minority communities. Furthermore, the paper highlights the emerging issue of racial biases embedded in artificial intelligence tools used in criminology, which can exacerbate discrimination. The author advocates for a reorientation of criminological research to incorporate minority perspectives and analyze data within both historical and contemporary contexts. This approach aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between race and criminal behavior, thereby promoting a more inclusive and equitable criminological practice.

Living liminally: how Korean women cope with the rise of anti-Asian violence in the United States as racialized, gendered, and liminal beings

Abstract This study delves into the unique identity navigation of Korean women in the US who do not align themselves with the broader Asian American label as they make sense of and respond to targeted violence against Asian women. In-depth interviews reveal the interplay of racialization and gendering that these women contend with, as well as the nuanced strategies they adopt to align or disalign themselves from ascribed identities in the wake of such violence. Findings highlight the inadequacies of U.S.-centric racial paradigms in capturing the intricacies of these liminal identities; by illuminating alternative ways of being within liminal spaces, this study offers insights into their transformative journeys and broader implications for race and gender discourse in America.

Navigating double marginalization: narratives of Asian (American) educators teaching and building solidarity

ABSTRACT This study examines Asian (American) teachers’ racialized experiences teaching and building solidarity with predominantly Black and Latinx students. Adopting tenets of Asian Critical Theory, the findings reveal participants’ paradoxical experiences of ‘double marginalization’: On one hand, they are broadly excluded from the Black-White racial paradigm and made invisible as racial outsiders and ‘forever foreigners’; on the other hand, they report feeling marginalized within the communities of Color due to the prevailing ‘model minority’ and ‘honorary White’ tropes. In resisting the ‘double marginalization’, participants strategically utilize their Asian (American) identities and experiences to challenge stereotypes about Asian (American) people and foster relationships with students and parents based on their shared struggles against White supremacy. This study has implications to reject Asian (American) invisibility in education research and practice by reclaiming the legacies of cross-racial solidarity-building among communities of Color and supporting the development of collective critical consciousness against racial division.

Some subtleties of whiteness in the workplace: Steps for shifting the paradigm.

This paper asserts that whiteness is a major ideological framework that is subtlety interwoven into our institutional structures and is a major organizing principle in the workplace. Efforts to increase racial equity, inclusion, and belongingness within the workplace and throughout society at large are ineffectual and virtually impossible without addressing the deleterious effects of whiteness. Addressing these pervasive subtleties in the workplace requires more than changing the complexion of an organization; instead, it also involves devoting ample attention to promoting widespread cultural change by being intentional about dismantling whiteness. An illustrative list of four preliminary steps for shifting the racial paradigm by attending to the ideology of whiteness in the workplace is provided.

Multiracial identity and social support: Navigating the monoracial paradigm of race

Following a racialized encounter, especially one that is racist or discriminatory, individuals often turn to those in their racial ingroup for social support. However, ingroup racial membership lines may be blurred for those with one Black parent and one White parent. The purpose of this study is to examine Black-White multiracial individuals’ experiences navigating the monoracial paradigm of race when seeking racialized support. Guided by Critical Multiracial Theory, I take a self-reflexive Interpretative Phenomenology Approach to explore the racialized support-seeking experiences of 15 Black-White biracial adults in the U.S. Results reveal a unique support seeking process that is influenced by the monoracial paradigm of race. Implications and opportunities for future research are discussed.

Staging Korean Haenyeos in Celine Song’s Endlings: Diasporic Subjectivity Torn between Ethnic Lineage and Metatheatrical Satire

In March 2020, haenyeos—Korean female sea divers who make their living by harvesting seafood without any breathing support apparatus—debuted on the New York stage in Celine Song’s play Endlings at New York Theatre Workshop. The play’s title indicates that being a haenyeo is a disappearing way of life that the younger generation will not learn or follow. The play comprises two distinct segments and locations: the first act tells the stories of three haenyeos on Man-Jae, an island near South Korea’s Jeju Island, while the second part focuses on Ha Young, who is trying to succeed as a playwright on the island of Manhattan in New York. Mourning the extinction of a pursuit that has existed for hundreds or even thousands of years, the first part of the play pays heartwarming tribute to the haenyeos. In the second part, however, the play juxtaposes the stories of the haenyeos with the topics of immigration, real estate, and the survival of a millennial Korean Canadian playwright, abruptly turning into a cynical metatheatrical satire about the white/other binary racial paradigm and the politics of representation. The issue of authenticity looms too large, reducing the grand, resilient spirit of the haenyeos to a mere theatrical device, and the play ends up missing the rare opportunity to tell a powerful story of the haenyeos.

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

Abolish Species: Notes toward an “Unfenced Is,” Part I

Despite its provenance in racial paradigms of colonial research, the notion of species has proved to be remarkably resilient and adaptable to post-racial frameworks of thought. Species has survived both the death of the subject and the cancellation of man. In their ascendance over nineteenth-century evolutionary theories of life, white environmentalisms have re-legitimated this keystone of biological racism by deploying species as if it were an ideologically agnostic articulation of a meaningful grouping. This article unsettles the common portrayal of species as a culturally unmarked and racially neutral concept, whose function is to denominate what remains of the planet. Working against the orthodox definition of species as the “basic unit of biodiversity,” I apprehend species as a form of onto-epistemic incarceration that has been imposed, globally, as the dominant mode of biological understanding and, subsequently, as the prevailing structure of representation used to account for environmental loss and abundance. In excess of its taxonomic function, species serves as an instrument that, practically and ideationally, converts flesh into potential wealth. This investigation begins by checking the conventional presumption that captivity is incidental to species and examines how, on the contrary, species is productive of capture, whose economic and epistemic dimensions are mutually enriching. This critical reappraisal then moves toward an argument for the abolition of species, made on the basis of four overlapping grounds. First, the institution of species enforces mono-lingualism and consolidates white entitlement to bestow a universal name on everything living. Second, species normalizes extractive incarceration as a means of accumulating value. Third, species secures Euro-American hegemony over the way difference is “objectively” defined—restrictively, in terms of heteronormative logics of reproduction that, in turn, lend coherence to projects of racialization. Fourth, the notion of species enforces a normative paradigm for processing environmental loss that blocks perception of the colonial violence that it reproduces.

The Racial Paradigm and Dalit Anti-Caste Activism in the United States

Abstract Based on interviews, some field research, and an analysis of online material, this paper focuses on the rights struggles of diasporic Indian caste groups formerly considered “Untouchable” whose self-chosen descriptor is “Dalit.” It examines Dalit activism in the United States around caste discrimination in both India and the U.S. The goal of this study is to demonstrate how Dalit American leaders use racial analogies in their international activism, and why race is a contested frame within the community. It makes clear that “universalistic” frames can obscure crucial particularities, making it harder to address the issue at hand. But it also reveals that dogmatic, particularistic frames can compromise the unity and mission of transnational movements. A 2020 lawsuit against Cisco Systems alleging caste discrimination toward a Dalit employee by Brahmin supervisors has opened the opportunity for anti-caste activists to develop a global norm specifically around how to address caste-based discrimination.

Rediscovering the conflict zone: Can the subaltern redefine the theory?

By utilizing autoethnography as a research method of a reflective self-examination set within the author’s cultural context and experiential world, this essay elucidates the nuanced positionality of Asians/Asian Americans at the intersection of the model minority myth discourse, colonial narratives, and the black–white binary paradigm of race relations by the employment of Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS). While the recent global movement toward racial awareness pushes us to consider the use of CWS, probing into the positionality of Asians/Asian Americans from the perspective of the aforementioned intersection helps us understand the carefully constructed racial paradigm that sets up the complex of the racial status quo. The paradigm has not only created the precarious space for those whose racial identities do not fit in the binary—inclusive of but not limited to Indigenous people, Asians, Latinx, and multiracial people—but has also polarized whites under the white supremacist system.

“From All Sides”: Black-Asian Reddit Communities Identify and Expand Experiences of the Multiracial Microaggression Taxonomy

The purpose of this paper is to examine the identity narratives of online Black-Asian communities concerning their multiracial microaggression experiences. As we are investigating an under-explored population, we utilize a purposive sampling method to narrow forum engagement by Black-Asian users on the popular social media network, Reddit. Our research is guided by multiracial critical theory (MultiCrit) which highlights monoracism as a ubiquitous element of the monoracial paradigm of race. In our research, we employ a content analysis using Black-Asian microaggression narratives to test the existing multiracial microaggression taxonomy. Our findings demonstrate that Black-Asian subreddit communities identified all of the existing multiracial microaggression categories: (1) exclusion or isolation; (2) exotification and objectification; (3) assumption of monoracial or mistaken identity; (4) denial of multiraciality; (5) pathologizing of identity and experiences; and (6) microaggressions based on racial stereotypes. Our analysis also found an emerging microaggression category entitled (7) white-mixed superiority. These multiracial microaggressions drew on monoracist ideologies and the monoracial paradigm of race, which exclude Black-Asian people and aid the maintenance of white supremacy in the United States. As such, we suggest further inquiry and expansion of the multiracial microaggression taxonomy to include how racism, particularly the monoracial paradigm of race, influences non-white multiracial identities.

Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin by Eugene M. Avrutin

Reviewed by: Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin by Eugene M. Avrutin Kimberly St. Julian Varnon (bio) Eugene M. Avrutin, Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). 140 pp., ill. Index. ISBN: 978-1-350-09728-5. Eugene M. Avrutin's Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin is a new release in Bloomsbury's Russian Shorts series. The brief, easy-to-read monograph is a timely and excellent addition to the literature on race and racism in Russia and the Soviet Union. The volume begins with the 2013 Biryulevo protests, which remain a frightening reminder of the power of racism in driving violence against Central Asians in contemporary Russia. Avrutin uses Biryulevo to underscore how Central Asian migrants in Russia are racialized as Black and how the Russian crowds use inflammatory, white supremacist language to mark Central Asians and Caucasians as others (P. 3). From these scenes, the reader learns that "Russia for Russians" and other racist sentiments are not new but a continuation of racialization and othering of ethnic minorities dating back to the tsarist period of Russian history. The introduction also provides readers with a cursory but helpful overview of the treatment of race in the secondary literature in Russian [End Page 377] and Soviet history. Avrutin argues that due to Russia's lack of an overseas empire, its absence in both the African slave trade and the Scramble for Africa, and the international image of the anti-racist Soviet Union, racism and racial thinking in Russia have often been overlooked in academic discourse. He correctly points out that race has often been portrayed as a nonissue in Soviet historiography. He asks: What factors account for this silence (dismissing race-based thought and practices)? Why have scholars shown so little interest in historical and theoretical discussions of race? (P. 4). Avrutin powerfully demonstrates that racial ideologies and racial hierarchies have been part of Russian cultural and social history throughout the 150 years that his book covers. From the premise of the "messy" color line – one in which the ideas and process of racialization are not fixed nor stable – Avrutin diagrams for readers the forms and functions of race in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. He argues that race did not dictate citizenship or social position in Russia or the Soviet Union, "but by rejecting the premise that an individual could belong to multiple identities, the state's classification system primed people to see the world in unambiguous racial terms" (P. 7). Thus, the classification and ordering of groups within the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union according to nationality or ethnicity can be better contextualized in a paradigm of race. The book is organized chronologically into four chapters. Chapter 1, "The Empire's Races," relates the development of anthropological and "scientific" thinking on race in the ethnically and culturally diverse Russian Empire. The chapter also places Russia within Western European discourses on race and racial differences in the nienteenth century. One of the most interesting sections of this chapter examines how Russian anthropologists and race ideologues approached Jews and other ethnic minorities within the empire. Race scientists such as the anthropologist Aleksei Arsen'evich Ivanovskii were confounded by Russia's Jewish population and categorized them as a distinct, non-Russian, race. Imperial expansion merged with the development of social sciences making the myriad of ethnic groups within the empire's borders a boon for Russian anthropologists and reified the idea that Russia was unique relative to its European imperial counterparts. Chapter 2, "Boundaries of Exclusion," builds on the previous chapter's explanation of how race and racial difference were discussed and applied in academics and research. It explores the execution of racialization through how Russianness was defined and utilized by the [End Page 378] tsar and the imperial government to engender public support, maintain political order, and oppress minority nationalities. This chapter draws on Avrutin's expertise in Jewish history with a fascinating discussion of the 1913 Beilis trial that ties the Russian reaction to the case to similar racist attitudes in the United States toward African Americans in the post–Reconstruction Era. Another...

The Immorality of Incarceration: Between Jāvēd Aḥmad Ghāmidī and Angela Y. Davis

The carceral nature of America’s criminal system has become a subject of fierce debate over the past few years as the extent of incarceration has gained notoriety. As a result, the decades-old argument for the abolition of prison has received its greatest reception to date, becoming the subject of popular conversation and a plethora of scholarly articles. Much of this discussion has centered on diagnosing the causes of mass incarceration. Empirical and historical studies have offered a strong case for the pervasive role of racial animus and discrimination in expanding the carceral state, which in turn has produced an abolitionist response as remedy to a broken system. At the same time, contexts far removed from America’s racial paradigm have also produced fierce critiques of incarceration. The introduction of prisons by European colonial powers met with native resistance across the Global South and, in the period since, a range of scholarly writing has continued to challenge prisons. Among the Global South’s most prominent examples of this abolitionist response has been those from scholars of Islamic law. These jurists have offered critiques that argue for both a doctrinal incongruence between incarceration and the Islamic legal tradition, as well as a moral chastisement of the carceral state. This Essay seeks to explore one such critique that represents a strand of abolitionist thinking in the Islamic legal tradition. While the American discourse has been preoccupied with abolition as a remedy for mass incarceration, the Islamic discourse is largely devoid of this concern; it critiques the institution of prison itself. The Essay’s overarching aim is to show how perspectives from the Global South, in this case Islamic law, might inform new approaches to abolition in other contexts. To accomplish this, the piece uses the thought of Muslim jurist and intellectual, Jāvēd Aḥmad Ghāmidī, examining both his ideas on imprisonment and broader approach to questions of law and morality. It then brings this discourse into conversation with key ideas in the work of American scholar–activist Angela Yvonne Davis. The animating inquiry will center on the moral arguments made in support of prison abolition and how Ghāmidī’s ideas, and by extension Islamic law, offer a unique perspective on this timely matter.

The Immorality of Incarceration: Between Jāvēd Aḥmad Ghāmidī and Angela Y. Davis

The carceral nature of America’s criminal system has become a subject of fierce debate over the past few years as the extent of incarceration has gained notoriety. As a result, the decades-old argument for the abolition of prison has received its greatest reception to date, becoming the subject of popular conversation and a plethora of scholarly articles. Much of this discussion has centered on diagnosing the causes of mass incarceration. Empirical and historical studies have offered a strong case for the pervasive role of racial animus and discrimination in expanding the carceral state, which in turn has produced an abolitionist response as remedy to a broken system. At the same time, contexts far removed from America’s racial paradigm have also produced fierce critiques of incarceration. The introduction of prisons by European colonial powers met with native resistance across the Global South and, in the period since, a range of scholarly writing has continued to challenge prisons. Among the Global South’s most prominent examples of this abolitionist response has been those from scholars of Islamic law. These jurists have offered critiques that argue for both a doctrinal incongruence between incarceration and the Islamic legal tradition, as well as a moral chastisement of the carceral state. This Essay seeks to explore one such critique that represents a strand of abolitionist thinking in the Islamic legal tradition. While the American discourse has been preoccupied with abolition as a remedy for mass incarceration, the Islamic discourse is largely devoid of this concern; it critiques the institution of prison itself. The Essay’s overarching aim is to show how perspectives from the Global South, in this case Islamic law, might inform new approaches to abolition in other contexts. To accomplish this, the piece uses the thought of Muslim jurist and intellectual, Jāvēd Aḥmad Ghāmidī, examining both his ideas on imprisonment and broader approach to questions of law and morality. It then brings this discourse into conversation with key ideas in the work of American scholar–activist Angela Yvonne Davis. The animating inquiry will center on the moral arguments made in support of prison abolition and how Ghāmidī’s ideas, and by extension Islamic law, offer a unique perspective on this timely matter.

History of (and in) Social Thought: theoretical-methodological strategies for a reinterpretation of the racial paradigm in Nina Rodrigues (1880-1906)

Resumo: Habitualmente trata-se da obra do médico e antropólogo Raimundo Nina Rodrigues como uma espécie de arquétipo do racismo científico, corrente que predominou nos círculos intelectuais brasileiros na virada do século XIX para o XX. As implicações dessa leitura seguem até hoje informando sobre as ideias vitais de um “homem de sciencias”, intérprete do Brasil, figura indispensável na tradição autoritária do Pensamento Social Brasileiro. Tendo como partida a multiplicidade de abordagens desse domínio específico das Ciências Humanas e Sociais - mas privilegiando o fazer historiográfico que o mesmo acolhe -, temos por objetivo aclarar os estratagemas teórico-metodológicos mobilizados em prol de uma releitura da obra rodrigueana. A ideia é deslocar o foco de um discurso único e exclusivamente fatalista e fixista - predominante até os dias atuais - para outro mais complexo, que foge ao determinismo racial e se apropria de outros conteúdos paradigmáticos da época - em especial o evolucionismo-social e a sociologia tardiana. A presente proposta tem por objetivo uma nova interpretação dos escritos rodrigueanos, autor que acomodou ideias, autores e conceitos que divergiam dos cânones raciais-darwinistas (excessivamente atrelados ao mesmo), mas não menos discriminatórios.

Creating the Paradigm of ‘New Nation’

Abstract Despite its official Catholic nature, Jozef Tiso’s Slovak State apparatus adopted not only the teachings of the eugenic movement but also the racial-hygiene ideology of National Socialist Germany, which it gradually implemented into its political culture. This study presents how eugenic and racial-hygiene thinking was introduced into the structures of Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana (HSĽS; Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party), the self-governing party of independent Slovakia during the Second World War, against the backdrop of developmental trends in Europe. What is emphasized here is the gradual formation of the racial paradigm in the spirit of a eugenic and racial-hygiene framework, as well as the formation of a ‘pure Aryan Slovak nation’ cult, physically and mentally contrasting with racially-hygienically ‘unclean and degenerate’ Jews and Roma.

Toward Theoretical Liberation: Challenging the Intellectual Imperialism of the Western Race Paradigm

Abstract We hope to encourage the development of decentered, decolonized, ground-breaking theory about ethnic and racial exploitation in the 21st century world-system. To accomplish that, we contend that academics and activists need to liberate themselves from the historical and ideological confines of the western race paradigm. Consequently, we have shaped this essay around that goal. In Section 2, we explore the dangers of universalizing the western race paradigm to the entire world. Section 3 investigates 21st century trends that challenge the western race paradigm, with particular focus on the significance of semiperipheries, transnational capitalist classes and nonwestern states. In Section 4, we argue that western race theory dominates scholarship globally through strategies of intellectual imperialism that need to be acknowledged, dismantled and overcome. In the Conclusion, we offer strategies for decentering and decolonizing knowledge production.