ABSTRACT In 1998, Her Interactive began publishing computer games intended for a market of girls ten and up based on the long-running Nancy Drew franchise. These games cited widely from women’s and girls’ culture to construct feminized spaces in which girl players could feel at home, while also promising to put the world within reach through references to unfamiliar and enriching cultural resources. This essay considers how these games reinforce hegemonic whiteness and racial hierarchies through the way players are made to move through, occupy, and feel at home in feminized game spaces. I argue that in recreating spaces historically associated with white feminine culture, Nancy Drew games were familiar, welcoming, and empowering primarily to white girlhood and thus reinforced white feminine spatial orientations—even as they represented a contrast to the masculine spaces most often seen in games at that time. In analyzing Nancy Drew games, this essay brings together feminist analysis of girls’ game spaces with game studies approaches that focus on race and postcolonial critique to demonstrate the specific ways that whiteness can be reinforced in domestic, intimate, and feminized spaces not through character representation, but through the privileged modes of white feminine spatial orientation they enable.

ABSTRACT This article examines the grassroots mobilization of Latinx immigrant food vendors—loncheros and hotdogueros—in Phoenix, Arizona, who overturned a citywide food truck ban between 1999 and 2001. Drawing on interviews, fieldwork, and archival sources, it explores how vendors legalized stationary food vending and reshaped urban space in the Southwest. While scholarship on street vending often focuses on large cities such as Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, few studies consider the Southwest or cases in which vendors influenced city policy. Vendors drew on the history of the Pochteca—Aztec merchants whose trade spanned the U.S. Southwest and Mexico—to assert historical and cultural belonging. They formed Unión Pochteca Vendedores Ambulantes LLC, first as a political association and later as a cooperatively run commissary. Situated within scholarship on Latinx urbanism, racialized illegality, and immigrant politics, this historical ethnography demonstrates how immigrant-led organizing continues to shape cultural, political, and regulatory debates today.

Abstract Scholars and politicians often refer to a “Latino vote” or a shared set of Latino political attitudes. This paper argues that such characterizations are, in part, an artifact of analytically aggregating Latinos across distinct racial classifications. Disaggregating Latinos by racial self-classification reveals systematic political sorting along the broader U.S. racial hierarchy. Using data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), I examine how Latino racial self-classification and a new measure— Linked Fate Prioritization —shape political attitudes and behaviors. Analysis 1 shows that racial self-classification influences Latino political views; Latino whites tend to lean more conservative, Latino Blacks tend to lean more liberal, and Latinos who do not select a racial category tend to fallf between. Analysis 2 shows that among Latino whites, those who prioritize white linked fate over Latino linked fate tend to be more conservative and show less support for Black political causes. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that Latino political attitudes are structured by racial self-classification and linked fate prioritization, challenging the notion of a unified Latino political ideology and underscoring the importance of race in shaping Latino political behavior. I offer some theoretical explanations for these patterns.

Abstract This article examines anti-colonialism and Third World solidarities in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. It does so through a study of the Black Liberation Front (BLF), a Black Power group formed in London in 1971. The BLF saw themselves as part of a global Third World solidarity, and, as activists in Britain, identified their location as ‘inside the belly of the monster’. They understood racism and colonialism as global phenomena, and offered material support to anti-colonial movements across the world, especially in Africa. The prevailing historiography of Black activism in post-war Britain foregrounds domestic anti-racism. Based on a reading of the BLF’s publications, alongside subsequent memoirs by and interviews with former BLF members, this article argues for Black activism in Britain to be viewed through a more global lens. Moreover, it shows how a deeper understanding of transnational anti-colonialism reconfigures our understanding of the domestic politics of race. Historians of decolonization must attend to how twentieth-century geographies of race and migration created the conditions for solidarities that do not fit within a metropole–colony binary.

The US agriculture industry has long been reliant on inequalities that intersect race and political economy. Farm policy further accentuates these inequalities as most farmworkers were excluded from New Deal labor and economic statutes due to pressure from Southern Congressmen and agricultural interests. Since then, the agricultural workforce has shifted from being overrepresented by southern Blacks and European immigrants to undocumented residents and migrant workers from Mexico and Central America. As with Black workers before the 1960s, most of these current farmworkers do not have civil or labor or voting rights. Our paper seeks to explain this inequality. We focus on policy development, emphasizing the intersecting roles of race and industrial agricultural interests as embedded within congressional and administrative institutions. We leverage theories of the second face of power and path dependency to highlight the agenda control of agricultural committees in Congress. We also highlight the role of the twentieth-century Bracero Programs and broader developments in the racial political economy to nuance the conventional narrative of the New Deal as a critical juncture for farmworker policy.

Abstract This essay shows how the United States racialized refugees through photography. American policy makers and news media have deployed photography as a definitive tool in characterizing Haitian “economic migrants” as “bad” refugees in opposition to “good” or “model” refugees from Vietnam. A cluster of black bodies on an unseaworthy boat came to represent an economic and hygienic threat, unlike the Vietnamese who are political victims of an oppressive communist regime. To critique our optical framework regulated by the Cold War racial politics, this essay historicizes how refugees were produced by American warfare and militarism. In the United States, war making, race making, and refugee making are mutually constitutive.

In 2020, amid global protests following the murder of George Floyd in the US, Lloyd’s of London – the world’s largest insurance marketplace with origins dating to 1688 – issued an historic apology for its role in the Atlantic slave trade. This confession was a volte-face following a century of ‘forgetting’ the subject. As a foundation of the global colonial economy, we increasingly know more about how insurance enabled Atlantic slavery, but much less about how such atrocities were subsequently marginalized and, in turn, how public controversy was renewed. At the intersection between finance, race, and empire, the argument here responds to this puzzle by explaining the Lloyd’s evading of slavery as a strategic orientation, backed by intellectual, legal, and corporate resources. The article argues that the reexamining of the Lloyd’s-slavery nexus was not only the product of Black Lives Matter, but the labor of many critical agents – scholars, lawyers, and insiders at Lloyd’s – who demanded accountability. By using the concept of the ‘selective tradition’ to excavate these cultural dynamics, the article has wider implications for IPE’s understanding of the racial politics of the insurance industry, as well as how institutional memory and narrative control work in the service of power.

ABSTRACT Laila Lalami’s novel The Moor’s Account reclaims the erased historical voice of the Moorish slave Estebanico, one of the first Arab Africans on the American continent in the 1500s. While Lalami explicitly positions her novel as a postcolonial revision of Cabeza de Vaca’s colonial report on the fate of Estebanico, this essay argues that a significant part of the novel’s literary resistance to Arab American racial vulnerability unfolds on the formal level. Lalami uses a series of unstated adaptations of foundational literary genres that have historically contributed to US nation building and race-making: Barbary captivity narratives, orientalist editions of The Arabian Nights, and African American slave narratives. Based on a mapping of the web of references underlying The Moor’s Account, I analyse how these multiple adaptations of foundational-national US narratives engage with and thus expose the past production of hegemonic racializing terms at the same time. In my reading, Lalami applies here a form of ‘adaptive agency’ that while ambivalent and not without complicities, repositions racial vulnerabilities embedded in dominant narratives as a source for historical revision and world making. The results suggest that the racial politics of literary adaptations can also become a modality of narrative resistance in vulnerability for multi-ethnic authors caught in between self-essentializing stereotypes and historical reproductions of silences around racialization in the Americas.

A review of Katharina Kehl: Boundaries of Queerness. Homonationalism and Racial Politics in Sweden, Bristol University Press. 2024.

<i>Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic.</i> By Jen Rose Smith

ABSTRACT Political scientist Dr. Paula D. McClain is an exemplary scholar who has dedicated much of her career to building diverse and inclusive scholarly communities in tandem with growing political science scholarship. Among Dr. McClain’s most enduring intellectual contributions is her pioneering work, Can We All Get Along? Racial and Ethnic Minorities in American Politics?, coauthored first with Dr. Joseph Stewart, Jr., and later with Dr. Jessica Johnson-Carew. Among the first comprehensive treatments of American racial and ethnic minority group politics, Can We All Get Along? still implores us to ponder a question that remains as critical as it has ever been to global and national politics, as well as to the academy and the discipline of political science, more than 30 years after its publication. The contributions to this special issue are dedicated to honoring the enduring significance of Can We All Get Along? and the extraordinary work and legacy of Dr. Paula McClain.

The media and cultural imperialism paradigm’s reliance on Marxist world-system analysis and class, alongside the globalization paradigm’s faith in cosmopolitanism, has made debates on race relatively uncommon in global media and communication studies. Recent literature on race and digital technology has placed race more firmly on the map within our wider field, but the bulk of this work remains nation-centric and has not addressed the tensions in transnational articulations of (anti)-racism(s). This article develops an analytical framework—“the scalar politics of race”—to understand how various actors strategically deploy scale to address race via social media, legacy media, and physical space. I apply this framework to 3 case studies, examining the global disciplining of national forms of racism, the hegemony of transnational forms of anti-racism and solidarity, and translocal appropriations of anti-racism.

This paper examines the tensions and differences in perspective that emerged within a university–school district research–practice partnership in the process of codesigning and implementing an out-of-school college- and career-readiness educational program aimed at ameliorating racial inequity. By analyzing interviews with both research- and practice-side research–practice partnership leaders involved in the decision-making and development process, we identified a set of three domains of ongoing negotiation and disagreement that materialized during initial stages of development related to differing conceptions of how best to navigate racial equity, the purposes and goals of collaborative research, and the role of new programs amid a broader ecosystem of youth-focused initiatives. We highlight the ways that partnerships between universities and school districts are fraught political endeavors that necessarily entail recognition, negotiation, and compromise of differing priorities, values, and perspectives.

Abstract: At present, embedding internationalization in teaching and extracurricular activities is a popular aim being taken on by universities worldwide to further develop higher education students as global citizens. An emerging way of achieving this aim is the adoption of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), a research-based virtual exchange modality where faculty in two countries develop a joint syllabus for students to transnationally learn and work together to meet shared learning objectives. Grounded in theory-based empirical analysis, this paper posits the capacity of COIL as a type of at-home internationalization able to encourage students to adopt a globally informed understanding of the politics of race. Exercising an in-depth analysis of a United Kingdom COIL case study and an accompanying analysis of focus group findings and questionnaires completed by British higher education students, this paper conceptualizes COIL’s potential to facilitate transformative learning outcomes. It offers a theoretical framework for educators to proactively analyse student perspectives and to understand what it takes for internationalization to empower effective anti-racist education, alongside the challenges that serve as barriers to this unique endeavour.

Between gourds and saltbush: the politics of race, coloniality, and recognition in Australia’s alternative food movements

The overall number and geographic footprint of the Latinx youth population has arisen alongside the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and subsequent calls to dismantle anti-Blackness in U.S. society. These co-occurring contexts have made it so that Latinx youth are more compelled to consider their relationship to Blackness and Black folks in their daily lives, whether it be their own Black roots or their anti-Black racism. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 24 Latinx youth from a multiracial community, I deploy the concepts of racial politics, racialized boundary making and anti-Blackness to analyze how they draw racialized boundaries between themselves and Black Americans. I find two main strategies in use: bonding through stories of sameness and shared struggle and (2) distancing through stories of violence and anti-Black stereotypes. I reveal how the racialized boundaries that Latinx youth construct at the micro level contribute to anti-Blackness in their community.

Abstract Turnout appeals are amplified in highly polarized, hotly contested elections like 2020. The political environment included social justice unrest, overt appeals to white male voters, and new voting procedures which resonated differently across intersectional identities. Gender and race politics intertwined to create a charged environment for mobilization and for social pressure to vote. We expect the nature and effectiveness of turnout appeals to have varied by race and gender intersections. In addition, given past behavior and the climate of protest, we expect individuals under 30 were less responsive to social pressures to vote. Using data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS 2020), we examine whether individuals with different intersectional identities varied in their perception of social pressure to vote as well as in the effectiveness of that pressure. We find that voters are sensitive to social pressure appeals, but both perception and responsiveness vary with intersectional identity.

This article revisits gold’s role within Bretton Woods, contributing to recent efforts to develop a more global and thematically inclusive international political economy (IPE). Challenging dominant representations of the gold issue, I foreground Bretton Woods’ hidden extractive foundations through a focus on the racial politics of South African gold mining. Combining theories of extractivism with new archival research, I revisit two episodes of postwar monetary politics to uncover hidden connections between extraction, race, and ­monetary order. I argue that the relationship between international liquidity, monetary stability, and economic expansion under Bretton Woods pivoted on gold ­supply from Apartheid South Africa, threading colonial continuities of racial extractivism through postwar monetary order. South African gold’s importance to international monetary stability rose in tandem with the racial brutality of Apartheid during the 1960s, transforming the extractivist foundations of gold supply from a naturalized background condition to a central concern linking the politics of international monetary stability and racial equality. I develop the concept of the ‘monetary color line’ to trace how extractive, racial, and monetary hierarchies intersected under Bretton Woods. I show how leveraging contemporary concerns with race and extractivism disrupts settled historical understandings of IPE.

South Asian diaspora populations occupy a complicated position in U.S. racial politics. Their racialization subjects them to hate and discrimination that might motivate participation in social movements; however, their heterogeneous socioeconomic and immigration status may discourage them from political action. Prevailing theorizations of minority mobilization do not fully explain South Asian American (SAA) interest and participation in activism. Drawing on twenty-seven interviews, this study argues that the circumstances that shape SAA life lead those interested in social movements to confront the problem of the two perfects: the projection of (1) the perfectly successful and politically apathetic South Asian achiever and (2) the perfectly committed and fully engaged social activist. Study participants expressed a wide range of relationships with the term “activist.” SAA civic engagement thus evades legibility under binary narratives of identity and activism but also illuminates previously understudied understandings of what activism is and who an activist may be.

This article argues that the figure of the joyful girl in fiesta served as an important site of contest over race, place, and memory in South Texas during the 1950s. The joyful girl has played a significant, if overlooked, role in fiesta traditions in South Texas: as a cultural symbol onto whom joy has been projected and as a historical actor who has experienced and shared joy with her community by participating in fiesta. This article first examines girlhood in the Texas Citrus Fiesta in Mission, Texas, an Anglo-run festival founded by citrus industry leaders that functioned as a formal place-marketing pageant. The fiesta’s promotional images often featured joyful Anglo American girls who served as symbols of white reproductive futurity in the region. Mexican American girls seldom appeared, but when they did, they appeared as figures in a timeless romanticized past that minimized the role of Mexican American girls in contemporary politics. Second, this article turns to the informal fiestas crafted by a Mexican American girl in her daily life growing up in Mission during the 1950s. Drawing on oral history, it shows how she actively used joyful song to affirm her ethnic Mexican cultural heritage while also drawing together communities across a racial divide. She challenged the racial politics asserted by the Texas Citrus Fiesta, her hometown’s official fiesta.