Racial Regimes Research Articles

Untangling anti-Indian narratives in the 2019 Bolivian crisis: violence, anxiety and discourse

ABSTRACT The 2005 arrival of Evo Morales to power came with high expectations about the increased participation of indigenous people in the country’s social and political life. However, the violence perpetrated against urban indigenous people allied to MAS from the moment Morales stepped down has shone a light on the volatile nature of unresolved racial tensions in Bolivia. This article centers on the rapid escalation of anti-Indian racism during the 2019 electoral crisis and ensuing political conflict and the weight of anti-Indian racial narratives at the heart of the violence. Through an analysis of archives and data collected during the conflict through mediated approaches , this paper examines the 2019 crisis, focusing on the surge in anti-Indian violence, and briefly discusses pre-crisis anti-racist efforts by the MAS administration. Then, it reflects on the idea of the ‘savage Indian’ and racial regimes that produced key ‘discursive formations’ that continue to polarize Bolivia. It then critically assesses the ideology of mestizaje’s racial role in the crisis, positioning it within a broader anti-Indian narrative that confines Indianness to the past while hindering acknowledgement, reconciliation, and healing from racial trauma.

Cyprus and Africa in the Makarios Era: Igniting the ‘Hot’ Solidarity Against Western Imperialism

ABSTRACT This paper examines a relatively understudied topic in the literature of Cypriot political history, namely the relations between Cyprus and African countries during the Makarios era. Drawing upon the official archives of the UN, USA, UK, and the Republic of Cyprus (specifically the Press and Information Office, PIO, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, MFA), as well as Cypriot newspapers, this research is grounded in historical analysis. The main findings of the paper suggest that Makarios perceived the Zurich-London status quo in Cyprus as contrary to principles such as self-determination, democracy, independence, and sovereignty, prompting him to engage in an international struggle for change. Makarios’s attitudes towards Cyprus aligned with African countries’ collective struggle under frameworks such as AAPSO, the Non-Aligned Movement, and G-77, both for themselves and the rest of the world. In various international forums, notably the United Nations, Cyprus and African nations provided mutual support against Western imperialism. Their collaboration extended beyond the Cyprus Problem to encompass the rights of people struggling for independence against colonialism all around the world and those seeking democracy in the face of racist regimes in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.

Racial Capitalism, Cedric Robinson, and a Method for Architectural History

Elaborating on the techniques that the Black Studies scholar Cedric Robinson uses to write the histories of racial capitalism, this essay outlines a way to approach longue durée architectural histories. Robinson analyses racial capitalism in Black Marxism (1983) through the practices of what he calls the Black radical tradition, and these techniques provide a way to conceptualise a history of architecture in the modern Atlantic World that focuses on denaturalising the racial regimes that have shaped it. Using a series of examples—a lecture by a carpenter-architect in upstate New York, Thomas Jefferson’s house Monticello, an advertisement for marble-quarrying labour in Tennessee, and the commodity chains of lumber—this essay outlines the questions and methods that Robinson’s approach, which he describes both as a “counterfeiting” of received discourse and as a non-dialectical negation of that discourse, suggests for architectural histories that attends to vast geographies and timescales.

Racial Regimes and White European Jewish Supremacy as Property

This article argues that the Zionist theft and expropriation of Palestinian land resulted in it being made into white property and that Zionism can be understood as a textbook case of Cedric Robinson's concept of racial regimes that explains how race is reproduced even though race is denied by the Zionist colonisers as justifying the relations of power. The article follows Cheryl Harris's and Noura Erakat's work on whiteness as property that, according to Erakat, leaves the Palestinian natives outside the category of Jewish nationals to be removed, dispossessed, and contained. The article illustrates how the ongoing colonisation of Palestine as expressing white European supremacy involves several aspects of racial capitalism—the Judaisation of Palestinian lands, the segmentation of labour from the Zionist policy of the Conquest of (Hebrew) Labour to the reliance on cheap and dispensable Palestinian labour, and the lebensraum plans to relocate the Gaza Strip population and re-settle it. 2

Federalism and Settler Imperialism: Racial Regimes, Whiteness, and Conquest in Canadian Constitutionalism

AbstractIn political science, federalism is often treated as an “antithesis” to empire. While Canadian Politics has recently become more attentive to the importance of ongoing settler colonialism as conditioning Canadian political life writ large, this has yet to induce a paradigm shift in understanding how the institutional logics of the state were established by, and in order to advance, colonial and imperial ends. This article contributes to this broader understanding by exploring how, in Canada, the federal arrangement congeals a constitutionalized whiteness that facilitates both the internal coherence of a settler class and its subsequent continental expansion. Attentive to the importance of this constitutional development within a world-spanning imperial context, this article also suggests that the simultaneous innovation of Dominion status contoured the early twentieth-century's global colour line, as self-determination was increasingly devolved to other white settler polities. The contradictory realities of these processes are also noted.

From liberation to freedom: Governing the “ghetto” in post-war Hungary

This article investigates the relationship between race and property in Hungary by examining the shifting discourse of the “ghetto” in post-war Hungary. I unpack the relationship between norms of propriety, or logics of use, associated with colonial epistemologies of land and the various racial projects deployed by the Hungarian state between socialist and liberal-capitalist governments. To operationalize this project, I put into conversation Brenna Bhandar’s racial regimes of ownership with David Theo Goldberg’s racial governmentality to understand the shifting logics and tactics of racial management toward Roma in Hungary. I show that the concept of the ghetto was crucial in the deployment of the racial project “The Elimination of Settlements with Unacceptable Social Conditions,” where the project was understood by officials as a palliative to the damage done by capitalist social relations. On the heels of this project, a group of liberal dissidents led by sociologist and demographer Istvan Kemeny forged a new problematic that centered state interventions on the Roma family. I show how this problematic was used to deny Roma tenure claims in the majority Roma Eighth District during the transition to liberal capitalism.

The American Wasteland: Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs on the Ecology of Racialization

ABSTRACT Recent years have seen an increasing recognition of the necessity to historicize and conceptualize ecological degradation in relation to capitalist and racist regimes of exploitation, epitomized by the popular concept of the “racial Capitalocene.” While constituting an important effort to move beyond a color-blind environmentalism and class analysis, many of these accounts tend to abstract away from the place- and time-determined specificities of contemporary racial capitalism. This paper reconstructs the ecological thought latently present in the work of revolutionary theorists, activists, and life-long partners Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs to explore an alternative analysis. It shows that, as part of their analysis of automation of the capitalist production process, the Boggses developed a powerful account of environmental harm alongside social deprivation. Extrapolating their concepts of social and material “waste” and “wastelands,” this paper argues that James and Grace Lee Boggs saw racist exploitation and ecological harm as intimately tied to the capitalist processes of valorization and devaluation. It shows that there emerges from their conjunctural analysis a novel theory of ecological racialization as well as some concrete implications for anti-capitalist, antiracist, and ecological struggles.

Touching Back while Black: Self-Defence and the Politics of Black US Citizenship in Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom

Considering the critical methods of performance studies, critical race studies, and sensorial studies, this article analyses the creation of social identities through the rubric of touch – a tactile sensibility that provides a cultural foundation for the mis perception of bodies as racialized subjects. Touch has been an under-researched and under-utilized methodology for understanding how race works. Specifically attending to the historical period of Jim Crow in the early twentieth century because of its deeply held investments in the politics of separateness, this article examines Paul Green’s 1926 Pulitzer Prize–winning play In Abraham’s Bosom as one of the rare dramas during this period that actually showed Black acts of touching back on the stage. Green challenges his audience to contend with an oppressive Jim Crow racial regime that forced African Americans to establish alternative modes of freedom outside of more traditional expressions of autonomy and citizenship. Reading Green’s work in this way allows for a consideration of the differing strategies at play in the fight toward equality for Black Americans. Taking up tactility, in the context of the United States, as a cultural system used to mark bodies as raced and weaponized to uphold white supremacy, this essay approaches touch as a performative act that is meaningful, effective, and consequential, thereby grappling with the present ways that American society underestimates the social, political, and cultural power that touch wields in our understanding of social identities.

Welfare for War Veterans: How the Dutch Empire Provided for European Mercenary Families, c. 1850 to 1914

AbstractThe largest “multinational” employers (avant la letter) were European India companies and colonial armies. Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, they recruited millions of mercenaries and soldiers from all over Europe, mostly from lower social classes. Beginning in the nineteenth century, they offered certain welfare-state services to these men and their legitimate and illegitimate families in Europe and the colonies. To maintain these systems, colonial states depended on cooperation with local, regional, and national administrations throughout Europe. However, the economic and welfare-state dimensions of violent European expansion have hitherto hardly been studied. This article uses the example of the Dutch colonial army to show for the first time how much money flowed from the colonies to lower-class European families. It analyses the transimperial networks of the Dutch colonial bureaucracy, and shows why men, women, and children in Europe and Asia, from diverse social backgrounds and subjected to dissimilar racial regimes, were affected quite differently by this global military labour market.

Pride Contested

This article explores Pride politics in post-Maidan Ukraine from queer feminist and decolonial perspectives. It aims to understand how the location of Ukraine on the fringes of two imperial formations, namely the global West and Russian imperialism, shapes Pride and its consequences for LGBT communities and broader society. The authors introduce the concept of buffer periphery as an analytic lens that focuses critically on both imperial formations simultaneously, while tracing naturalized colonial discourses. The first part of the article analyzes the material-symbolic framing of Kyiv Pride marches in the context of the NGO-ization of LGBT activism, police reform, the war in Donbas, and the corresponding militarization of Ukrainian society and the region at large. The analysis is focused on how West-centered geopolitics of liberation and the Euro-oriented aspirations of the Ukrainian government work together to animate Pride politics and instrumentalize them. The second part closely examines the case of the Queer Anarcho-Feminist Block at the 2017 Kyiv Pride, considering it an attempt decolonial resistance to neoliberalization and militarization of Pride and LGBT politics in Ukraine. The article suggests that the resulting outcome of Kyiv Pride marches with respect to broader LGBT communities in Ukraine is rather ambiguous. While acknowledging its influence on public opinion and media discourse as well as its personal significance for many community members, the authors offer a critical perspective on Kyiv Pride as a vehicle and an effect of the colonial geopolitics of liberation. It remains unclear to what extent Kyiv Pride challenged homophobia and transphobia, let alone capitalist and racist regimes of power, or if it perhaps just converted the idea of LGBT liberation into a homocapitalist project of producing loyal sexual citizens.

White people's activism in US‐ based social movements for racial justice

AbstractThere is a long history of small groups of white activists engaging in social movements for racial justice led by Black Indigenous and People of Color in the United States. Yet organized white antiracism has received much less study than white racism. From forging antiracist identities to crafting racial justice organizing strategies, white people's involvement in BIPOC‐led liberation struggles has proven both promising and problematic. This article explores what scholars know about white people's involvement in US‐ based racial justice efforts in order to pose central questions and quandaries for future study. It focuses on white antiracist activism in the United States beginning in the Civil Rights era. During the late 20th century, US‐based racial justice campaigns became fragmented across diverse networks and issue areas making it harder to locate groups of white people collectively aligning with a visible and unified social movement for racial justice. This appears to be shifting. Racial logics and racist regimes have proven themselves eminently flexible, and investigating how white people have tried to join social movements for racial justice illuminates important areas for future study.

“I Can’t Breathe:” The Invisible Slow Violence of Breathing Politics in Minneapolis

Following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, his utterance, “I can’t breathe,” reverberated internationally as the world population grappled with the twin specters of life-threatening COVID-19 respiratory morbidities and mounting years under increasingly polarized racist regimes. Despite crisis fatigue, national and international outpourings of solidarity trended on social and mainstream media. However, in this moment, the legacy of structural and slow violences against the living, breathing Minneapolis–St. Paul communities of color were obscured. This article addresses transdisciplinary breathing politics in this mid-sized American city to integrate atmospheric indicators (concentrations of criteria pollutants including particulate matter and gaseous pollutants), traffic indicators (Minnesota Department of Transportation permanent traffic monitoring station data), and social indicators (community responses in newspaper and Twitter archives), ultimately making visible how Floyd’s utterance reflects much deeper patterns of stratified urban public health risks and socio-environmental airscape politics. Bullet Points of Findings Breathing politics are racialized in Minneapolis, demonstrating stark differences in traffic and air quality across neighborhoods. Through content analysis, it is shown that social media platforms like Twitter can be rich historical records for tracking local public discourse, providing valuable insight to the ways people talk about and conceive topics like environmental justice, breathing politics, and urban equity. While hashtag activism on social media flourished in 2020 to address anti-Black racism, it was neither a “tipping point” nor did it show a discernible impact on the nature of environmental justice discourse about breathing politics, despite the steep rise of #ICantBreathe. Integrating social, economic, and environmental indicators has the overarching benefit of addressing complex, lived systems.

Examining the long-term influence of New Deal era redlining on contemporary gentrification

The New Deal era’s Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) programme has garnered notoriety for denying Black communities financial investment based on their race through the practice known as redlining. It is possible that redlining influenced future investment in these neighbourhoods by making them more appealing to gentrifiers through creating a rent gap or increasing the percentage of non-White populations. To explore the link between HOLC redlining and gentrification, we drew upon a sample of 58 cities across the United States from the Mapping Decline project. We also leveraged historical Census data collected by IPUMS and the Longitudinal Tract Database, as well as data on urban renewal from Renewing Inequality to control for intervening factors. Findings indicate that HOLC redlining can either directly or indirectly relate to gentrification depending on when gentrification begins. These findings encourage more consideration of the role of racist government policies in determining when gentrification will occur.

“Not that her being black had anything to do with it, for me”: Blackness in Emma Donoghue’s “The Welcome”

The paper aims to analyze the construction of the character JJ in Emma Donoghue’s short story “The Welcome” (2006). The story portrays Luce’s sexual awakening for JJ, the new resident of the women-only cooperative living residence, The Welcome. The shyness of JJ and her supposed indifference to the attempt at a romantic approach and friendship made by Luce is a reaction to the process of transgenderism. If, as the Argentine critic Ricardo Piglia (2000) argues, all short stories narrate two stories, the first is a frustrated love story, and the second is about JJ’s revelation as a transgender person. The critical intervention undertaken in this article challenges and exposes internalized images and racial regimes of representation by demonstrating that the signs and elements which prepare the reader for JJ’s revelation represent her as an abject character. ​​From being fundamental to the theory of subjectivity (Kristeva 1988, McAfee 2004) to a signifying practice of the body and sexuality (Butler 1999), abjection is a common signifier of blackness (Scott 2010). By intersecting race, gender, and sexual identities, the short story fails to represent JJ as a complete subject because it articulates stereotypical images around blackness and transgenderism, casting, at once, both terms as abjection. Thus, the centralization of Luce’s desire and the representation of JJ as an abject character suggest the impossibility of intimacy for the black queer body within the homonormative parameters of gender, sexuality, and race.

White psychodrama

White psychodrama

Anti-jewish racism. Exploring the Swedish racial regime

Anti-jewish racism. Exploring the Swedish racial regime

Art for People's Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975 by Rebecca Zorach

Art for People's Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975 by Rebecca Zorach

Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight ed. by Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack

Reviewed by: Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight ed. by Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack Jay Watson (bio) Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight. Eds. Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2023. 256 pp. 10 b&w illustrations. $99.00 hardcover, $30.00 paperback. In this sparkling collection, editors Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack set out to show, in their own words, "that Welty was both a pupil to the mystery genre and a practitioner too" (22). In this effort, they and their nine fellow contributors succeed abundantly. Welty's engagement with mystery and crime fiction, as both reader and writer, began early and never abated, though critics have for the most part been slow to take up the author's relationship to the form and its conventions. This volume changes that. At sixteen, Welty was already parodying Golden Age mystery writers such as G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, and Carolyn Wells in the pages of the student newspaper at Mississippi State College for Women, where she published "The Great Pinnington Solves the Mystery" in 1925, accompanied by a pair of cartoons she penned herself. And she was still, to use Agner and Pollack's term, "sport[ing] with the genre" (22) in late unpublished stories such as "The Alterations" and "The Shadow Club." Along the way, she irreverently and inventively bent mystery conventions to the modernist aims of "her signature story form," "the minimalist puzzle-text" (20), and she formed one of the most significant literary friendships of her era with mystery writer Ken Millar (who published as Ross Macdonald), richly documented in a thirteen-year correspondence that ended with Millar's death in 1983. The introduction, nine essays, and appendix of Eudora Welty and Mystery comb Welty's published oeuvre and her archive for clues to how a form too often maligned as lowbrow kindled the imagination of a luminous literary artist. And when I say "clues," I don't mean it figuratively. Several essays bring out the detective in the literary critic, piecing together neglected bits of [End Page 157] textual evidence to uncover unsuspected plots, crimes, and identities, building new readings of Welty classics. Andrew Leiter, for instance, attends to young Loch Morrison's sleuthing in The Golden Apples, which expands and deepens the novel's coming-of-age plot to include queerer figures and desires afoot in Morgana than are usually attributed to the narrative's sexual bildung. Rebecca Mark revisits the contradictory accounts of Bonnie Dee Peacock's death in The Ponder Heart and finds them all to be alibis, cover stories for Bonnie Dee's successful escape from the text: the getaway of an unhappy, young wife who joins Edna Earle Ponder and domestic worker Narciss in harboring murderous designs on the overbearing patriarch, Daniel Ponder. Pollack conducts her own investigation into the orphaned Gloria Short's disputed origins in Losing Battles, posing her own likely suspects before noting how this enigma, much discussed and debated by the Renfro-Beecham clan, works to distract reader and characters alike from—and thus to forestall any conscientious reckoning with—Nathan Beecham's blurted confession that he has murdered Herman Dearman and let an anonymous Black man hang for the crime. The deeper mystery of Losing Battles, Pollack argues—one that powerfully implicates Mississippi's mid-century racial regime—lies in how matter-of-factly a Black man can be scapegoated while "the white male offender is ultimately left free to wander the world" (174). Meanwhile, Suzanne Marrs finds, in the amnesia that afflicts the protagonist of "The Shadow Club," Justine, after a traumatic assault, an imaginative exploration on Welty's part of the memory loss suffered by her dear friend Millar as he descended into Alzheimer's disease. By using the mystery genre as a form of "imaginative autobiography," Marrs asserts, Welty was actually following Ross Macdonald's lead in novels such as Sleeping Beauty where Millar had used fiction to explore his relationship with his troubled daughter (211). Not the least of this volume's rewards is that it makes Welty so fun. Not that she really needs the assist, of course: readers and scholars have long...

Transatlantic Crossings

This article traces the transatlantic crossings and overlooked career of the expatriate Black American filmmaker Madubuko Diakité and analyzes his limited but rich body of work. It argues that Diakité should be understood as part of an internationalism grounded in the Black radical tradition but irreducible to fixed identity categories. It also contends that Diakité’s work is boundary-crossing in an aesthetic sense: by infusing the moving image with a polyvocal, socio-aesthetic sounding—a poetics of sonic displacement—Diakité unsettles the racial regime of representation and opens new fugitive pathways.

Signs of a combatant. Comparative analysis in the context of international and domestic armed conflicts

The issue related to the specifics of determining the characteristic features of a combatant during an armed conflict is under consideration. The provisions of international conventions and national legislation of Ukraine, which regulate relations during an armed conflict between warring parties and determine the status of participants in an armed conflict, are analyzed. Considerable attention is paid by the author to the analysis of such international legal acts as Geneva Convention III of 1949. "On the Protection of Prisoners of War" and Additional Protocol I of 1977. In particular, the important provisions of the Geneva Convention are the indication that, in addition to the provisions that are carried out in peacetime, this Convention applies in all cases of declared war or any other armed conflict that may arise between two or more High Contracting Parties, even if the state of war not recognized as one of them. The Convention also applies in all cases of partial or total occupation of the territory of the High Contracting Party, even if no armed resistance is offered to this occupation.
 Norms of Additional Protocol I of 1977 are no less relevant at present.
 Key in the analysis of the mentioned document is the provision that in cases not provided for by this Protocol or other international agreements, civilians and combatants remain under the protection and effect of the principles of international law arising from established customs, from the principles of humanity and from the requirements of public conscience. This Protocol, supplementing the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949 for the Protection of War Victims, applies in the situations specified in Article 2, common to these Conventions. The situations mentioned in the previous paragraph include armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial rule , foreign occupation and racist regimes to exercise their right to self-determination enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and in the Declaration on Principles of International Law Relating to Friendly Relations and Cooperation between States in accordance with the Charter of the Organization
 United Nations.
 The author tries to identify the characteristic features that indicate the combatants belong to the legal participants in both the international armed conflict and to identify the members of the resistance movement who may belong to the legal combatants and qualitatively distinguish them from mercenaries and other illegal participants in the armed conflict.
 Entering the new, third millennium, humanity could not get rid of old problems, which are reminded of themselves every time with the appearance of another armed conflict. Unfortunately, Ukraine was not an exception, on whose territory the armed aggression of the Russian Federation has been ongoing since 2014. The result of the aggression was a full-scale invasion of the territory of Ukraine by Russian troops on February 24, 2022. In essence, an international armed conflict of varying intensity has been taking place on the territory of Ukraine since 2014, which has turned into full-scale hostilities across the country since February 24, 2022.
 Modern international relations are characterized by a change in the nature of the conflict, the emergence of a number of new categories and situations, an increase in the number of victims among the civilian population, and the increasing internationalization of armed conflicts of a non-international nature. In this regard, the issue of identification of combatants during an armed conflict is extremely relevant.
 The author did not ignore the national legislation of Ukraine on the issue of identification of servicemen of the regular armed forces. Thus, the provisions of the Law of Ukraine "On the Defense of Ukraine" and the Regulation on special purpose units (squads) of the National Guard of Ukraine dated July 9, 2014, No. 651, were subjected to a thorough analysis.
 This article actually confirms the relevance of the application of international humanitarian law in national legislation and points to significant gaps that cannot be filled without the help of international law as a whole.
 With his work, the author tries to draw the attention of domestic legislators to the problems of implementing international humanitarian law into the national law of Ukraine, and to single out the most important directions in this area.