Racial Regimes Research Articles

Ahmed Kathrada in post-war Europe: Holocaust memory and apartheid South Africa (1951-1952)

ABSTRACTThis paper is part of a larger study exploring cultural and discursive performances of Holocaust memory in South Africa under the apartheid racist regime (1948–1994). During the years of apartheid rule, South Africans of diverse backgrounds regularly invoked the memory of the Holocaust. In his 2004 memoirs, the Indian South African anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada briefly narrates the course of his European odyssey (1951–1952), where he witnessed first-hand the destruction left by the Second World War and by the Holocaust in particular. Using Kathrada’s memoirs; an interview I conducted with him in August 2016, and archival records concerning the cultural events he attended while in Europe, I tease out Kathrada’s insights on the Jewish Holocaust through a distinctively internationalist perception of colonialism. In addition, I address specific threads of communist thought that shaped his worldview. Despite his communist background, records of his visits to the Auschwitz concentration camp and to the Warsaw Ghetto reveal Kathrada’s unique perception of the Holocaust – in marked distinction from Soviet approaches to the Holocaust and its memorialization. Moreover, an analysis of Kathrada’s public speeches delivered over the 1950s repositions Kathrada’s little known sojourn in Europe as central in shaping his insights regarding the consequences of racism. These insights, gleaned in Europe, are brought home to South Africa. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s paradigm of multidirectional memory, this paper explores how Kathrada interweaves different narratives, structuring his own imaginaries and identities by negotiating between different practices of commemoration and memorialization, in a search for justice and solidarity, and as a means of articulating his own position as a victim of apartheid South Africa.

Sugarcane Sakadas: The Corporate Production of the Filipino on a Hawai‘i Plantation

ABSTRACTThis article traces a genealogy of “Filipino” ethnicity to plantations and labor management from the nineteenth century to 1913. It argues that the Filipino on Hawaiʻi, later known as sakadas, emerged through the labor management techniques of sugar plantations and other state and private collaborators. Financial institutions, such as banks and accounting offices, used ethnicity to manage Ilokano (Northern Philippine lowlands peoples) migrant workers, who enjoyed relatively high mobility by virtue of their American colonial status. These institutions drew upon racial regimes developed through nineteenth-century Spanish agriculture, which generated an inland peasantry through the dispossession of their native lifeways.

Legendary Affect: Intimacies in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop

This essay uses affect theory to better understand Willa Cather’s master experiment with legend in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Treating emotions not as interior to individuals but as dynamic impressions within social networks, I connect the novel’s deliberate, nondramatic continuity of feeling to Cather’s understanding of the legend as a genre. The novel articulates the value of legends repeatedly, and Cather viewed Archbishop itself as a legend. Its serene, inexorable narrative of incomplete intimacies celebrates bonds of faith and love, even as it documents failures of understanding and the weaknesses of personal attachments as a form of resistance to oppression. Discovering what I call “legendary affect” at work does not absolve Archbishop from complicity with racist regimes and colonial enterprises, and the speed with which the text moves on can act as a silencing mechanism. Yet its resolute pace allows Cather to register some of the most elusive and disturbing dimensions of cross-cultural encounters.

Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830 ed. by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Reviewed by: Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830 ed. by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra Jason Daniels Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830. Edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. x, 330. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8122-4983-5.) Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra's Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830 is a collection of twelve essays that examine the "entangled histories" of the Iberian and British Atlantic worlds as well as the archival processes that rendered those interconnected and common histories invisible (p. 3). Crafted by a diverse group of scholars, the essays focus primarily on the economic and intellectual strands that tied the two Atlantics together. The essays range in both depth and scope. With coverage across three centuries and more than a dozen locales in both the Atlantic and Pacific worlds, this collection appeals to a wide range of scholars working on sociocultural, intellectual, political, and economic histories. The volume is divided into four parts. Part 1, "Severed Histories," is composed of three essays. Mark Sheaves examines the actions of two "culturally ambidextrous merchants" operating around various places of the Iberian Atlantic world during the mid-sixteenth century (p. 6). Sheaves illustrates how individuals navigated between Iberian Catholic and English Protestant spheres by pragmatically shifting identities according to various religious and political climates in order to advance their particular sociocultural and economic goals. Michael Guasco's essay focuses on the underexamined role that Africans played in introducing the English to the Atlantic world. Guasco argues that a reevaluation of Anglo-African interactions before the rise of plantation slavery is crucial to understanding the expansion of the Anglo Atlantic colonial endeavor and England's rising competition with Spain. Taking on another long-held tradition, Benjamin Breen argues that it was the British, rather than the Dutch, who replaced the Portuguese in the tropics. He contends that the British inherited land, capital, and trading networks, as well as invaluable botanical and anthropological information, from the Portuguese. Breen highlights the epistemological link forged between the Portuguese and the British as they exchanged pharmaceutical knowledge and materials. Collectively, these essays highlight how deliberate erasures of the Iberian source material from the Anglo Atlantic narrative engendered two separate archival processes and two distinct historiographies of two obviously interconnected empires. Part 2, "Brokers and Translators," examines the role European cultural intermediaries played in either facilitating or obscuring Anglo-Iberian entanglements. Christopher Heaney examines the English understanding of South America during the mid-sixteenth century through an analysis of the work of Sir Thomas More and Richard Eden. Heaney argues that Eden's work, which built on More's Utopia, praised the Spanish colonial endeavor in Peru and encouraged "English navigators and merchants to contribute to and profit from an [End Page 410] expanding 'Christian Empire' of native peoples" (p. 86). Holly Snyder highlights the role Iberian Jews played in British imperial expansion during the seventeenth century. She illustrates how Jews embraced various religious identities to negotiate different local political-religious circumstances to further their personal agendas. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara uses the life of George Dawson Flinter to illustrate "the deep history of Irish immigration to peninsular Spain and the Spanish colonies and naturalization as Spanish subjects; Irish military service to the Spanish crown; and Irish involvement with the struggles over slavery and abolition in the Spanish colonial empire" (p. 125). Cameron B. Strang's examination of Anglo-Spanish merchant-planters during the second British occupation of Spanish Florida reveals how some colonists embraced the racial regime in the Spanish Caribbean because it was more in tune with their personal agendas regarding their multiracial families. He argues that Florida was "a place where slave-owning whites' mastery was not limited by prohibitions against publicly enjoying interracial intimacies" (p. 143). As a result, they attempted to forestall U.S. rule and strove to convince Anglo Americans that Africans and American Indians were not inherently inferior. In Part 3, "Possession, Sovereignty, and Legitimacy," essays by Cañizares-Esguerra and Bradley Dixon explore traditional notions of Anglo-Iberian discourses about sovereignty and possession of the Americas in untraditional ways. The editor's contribution challenges the long...

Critical Nostalgias in Democratic South Africa

ABSTRACTEvidence suggests that some black residents in South Africa experience nostalgia for the racist and authoritarian apartheid regime. What dynamics generate apartheid nostalgia, and what work does it do? This article draws on in-depth interviews with black residents of impoverished urban townships and informal settlements. I argue that by eliminating formal racial discrimination and redirecting popular aspirations towards the state, South Africa’s democratic transition encouraged apartheid nostalgia, which residents deployed to criticize the post-apartheid state and imagine alternative possibilities. Far from uniform, nostalgic expressions focused on four objects: social protection, migrant exclusion, bureaucratic integrity, and white governance. Each object represented an aspect of the apartheid state that residents sought to resurrect. The analysis calls for a shift from a politics of regret, focused on shame for past atrocities, to a politics of nostalgia, which understands idealized projections of past objects as a terrain of struggle.

Hanya Yanagihara's The People in the Trees and post-colonial trauma criticism

ABSTRACTThe figure of a wounded body has been part of the cultural iconography of psychoanalysis since Freud defined trauma as the infringement of psyche's protective membrane that incites a neurotic response and represses memory of the injurious event. Recent feminist and postcolonial critiques of cultural trauma theory have problematised this ‘wound-centrism’ insofar as it has privileged an individuated, event-like and time-framed conceptions of violence, and has neglected systemic, incremental, continuous and quotidian experiences of violence. This article contributes to these critiques by analysing Hanya Yanagihara's 2013 novel The People in the Trees, which narrates an anthropological expedition to a fictitious Micronesian island and sets in motion aggressive colonisation of its populations. Yanagihara's postcolonial trauma novel offers a critical perspective onto the idiom of wounding not by denying its importance for some subjective experiences of violence, but by situating it in relation to other figurations of trauma. I argue that central to this narrative is the idea of traumatic appropriation, understood not only in line with social critiques of colonial and racial regimes of accumulation and dispossession, but also as an expression of epistemic violence that assigns personhood status solely to property owners and endows colonised populations with characteristics of things and commodities.

Negotiating postcolonial Eurasian identities and national belonging in global-city Singapore

ABSTRACTA racial classification regime, partly derived from colonial race categories that solidified during the British Empire, remains a key governance strategy in postcolonial Singapore, sorting citizens into the categories of Chinese, Malay, Indian or Other (CMIO). This racial grid continues to be a simplification of the actual complexity of lived identities and experiences, particularly for people of mixed descent. In this context, we explore the contemporary meanings and resonances of racial identity and national belonging as negotiated among members of a historic mixed-descent community – the Eurasians – in the context of a nation-state built on an institutionally fixed racial template. As a community, Eurasians are commonly attributed to the presence and mixing of especially Dutch, Portuguese and British – but also other Europeans – with an equally variegated palette of Asian cultures, since the 16th century. Based on 30 biographical interviews with self- identified Eurasians of two generations, this paper examines how individual and collective narratives of ‘old’ hybrid identities are changing in relation to the emergence of potentially new hierarchies of racial belonging with the arrival of new migration and the rise of international marriage in globalizing times. Given the lived reality of an expanding range of ‘race’ identities of different permutations and combinations, the politics of choice is played out between countervailing forces which draw racialized boundaries around the community more tightly on the one hand, and liberalize claims to racial and national belonging on the basis of self-identification on the other.

British Policy Towards Military Cooperation with the Republic of South Africa, 1961–1975

ABSTRACTThe early 1960s were a turbulent time in South Africa; the Sharpeville Massacre provoked condemnation from the international community, which, with the acceleration of decolonisation, was turning increasingly against Pretoria. The decision to withdraw its re-application to the Commonwealth in October 1960 further isolated South Africa. Despite this, UK–South African military cooperation remained largely unaffected until the pivotal Simonstown Agreement's termination in 1975. This article explores this relationship and explains why British policy-makers consistently maintained links with an overtly racist regime. UK–South African military cooperation was persistently controversial and engendered frequent criticism from African members of the Commonwealth and from campaigning groups such as the Anti-Apartheid Movement, whose membership included Labour ministers. Concurrently, Pretoria was viewed as an important Cold War ally, particularly in the context of the build-up of Soviet naval incursions into the Indian Ocean from 1968 onwards. This article will analyse how British officials attempted to navigate its military relations with South Africa under such heated circumstances.

“City on a Hill?”

There are not many states that have legislated differential degrees of citizenship and rights based on allegedly racial grounds, at least after the ending of chattel slavery. Three that stand out are the United States, the Union (later Republic) of South Africa, and the Third Reich. The legal historian James Whitman has written an eye-opening study of the influence of the American states’ legalized racial disabilities (segregated public facilities and prohibition of interracial marriage) on the political and legal architects of National Socialist racial laws, in particular those announced at the Nuremberg Party rally in September 1935. He argues persuasively that the Nazi authorities admired the American racial regime (as they did many other aspects of the United States, such as its industrial prowess), studied it carefully, and sought to emulate those aspects that they could, but changing the target of the legislation from African Americans in the United States to Jews in Germany. Those Nazi lawyers inspired by the American legislation believed that U.S. racial awareness was hobbled by unwillingness to include Jews along with “coloreds” as a threat to its Volk. But appropriate German legislation, such as envisaged for Nuremberg, could overcome this American short-sightedness.

Offline: Sexual and reproductive rights—health and hypocrisy

Mark Heywood stood to ask his question in Johannesburg last week at the launch of the Guttmacher–Lancet Commission on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights for All. He observed that we were in a country blighted with a “rape culture”—the epicentre of an epidemic of violations against sexual and reproductive rights. The country had no strategy for dealing with these violations. Only recently was a draft policy on teenage pregnancy written. Regression is taking place in access to abortion. And what, he asked, did we think about the present crisis engulfing UNAIDS? Michel Sidibé, its Executive Director, was arriving in South Africa that same day. And yet wasn't he guilty of failing to deal with the same issues we were urging others to address? What message did we have for him? The launch of our Commission was held in Constitution Hill, a former jail where many anti-apartheid campaigners were once incarcerated. We were in the Women's Prison, now converted into a museum and memorial to South Africa's tortured past. The violent imposition of white racial power. Black women registered in blue ink, white women in red. Physical and psychological humiliation. Dehumanisation. Mindless and repetitive tasks, such as washing, scrubbing, and shining floors with cloths and brushes, working on bleeding knees. Doctors and nurses employed in the prison colluded with the racist regime, inflicting additional cruelties. “I wanted nothing to do with their doctors. I thought they would poison me”, said one prisoner. Another: “There was one black woman who slipped in the shower and broke her hip. The doctor wouldn't come out at night to see her. He made her stand in the queue and he swore at her. Her face was swollen with pain.” South Africa today is free. But violence against women and girls has assumed new forms. Karabo Mokoena, 22 years old and murdered in Johannesburg. Her killer doused her body in acid and set it ablaze. He was sentenced to 32 years in prison just days before we arrived. Zolile Khumalo, a 21-year-old student in Durban. Zolile's former partner shot her dead in her dormitory. In South Africa, the frequency of femicide is five-times the global rate. Every 4 h a woman is murdered. One in five women over the age of 18 years has experienced violence by their partner. A newspaper, The Star, called femicide, “a South African curse”. The health and rights of women and girls worldwide are under attack. The purpose of the Guttmacher–Lancet Commission, co-chaired by Ann Starrs and Alex Ezeh, was to write a new manifesto to advance sexual and reproductive health and rights. We want to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the Sustainable Development Goals. We want to insist on a package of essential and cost-effective interventions as part of universal health coverage. And we want to fight against the forces of conservatism that are killing women, especially young women, today. This struggle is political as well as technical. As Justice Edwin Cameron noted, “Speaking about sex is a political act.” And Mark Heywood's question? Michel Sidibé has done much that is good at UNAIDS. He is a compelling activist. He commands respect and admiration among politicians. His ability to communicate the continued urgency of the AIDS epidemic has saved countless lives. And yet his responses to allegations of sexual misconduct at UNAIDS have been disappointing. He has supporters. But the growing schism over his leadership only shows how divided the AIDS community has become through statements and decisions that many view as ambivalent and ambiguous. There are calls for Sidibé to resign or to be fired. Neither outcome should happen. The UNAIDS Programme Coordinating Board last week issued its terms of reference for an Independent Expert Panel on sexual harassment, bullying, and abuse at the UNAIDS secretariat. The panel will deliver its report by December. UN Secretary-General António Guterres must then decide Sidibé's fate. In the meantime, the right response should surely be that Sidibé voluntarily suspends himself during the period of this inquiry. Voluntary suspension would enable an acting Executive Director (possibly Gunilla Carlsson, who only joined UNAIDS in February) to defuse a disablingly acrimonious dispute and restore confidence in UNAIDS. Defending sexual and reproductive health and rights leaves no room for hypocrisy.

The Other Within: White Shame, Native-American Genocide

In this article, the author asks about the genocidal history of the United States, and the forms of reparation and recognition that can be found in white racial shame and white racial guilt. Examining the history of white supremacy in the United States, the author queries the differential practices of twin racial regimes: African-American slavery and the extermination of Indigenous peoples. Because of these differential practices of persecution, the “vanished Indian” will enter white psychoanalysis through the evocation of “creative racial shame”; whereas African-American slavery has entered that psychoanalysis through depressive white guilt. Much as psychoanalysis has distinguished pathological guilt from the depressive guilt that leads to reparation and remorse, the author distinguishes pathological shame from a creative form of shame that allows us to see the Other whom whiteness has vanished.

Inside the NBA: Black Dandyism and the Racial Regime

Inside the NBA: Black Dandyism and the Racial Regime

Dangerous Subjects: James D. Saules and the Rise of Black Exclusion in Oregon by Kenneth R. Coleman

429 Reviews REVIEWS DANGEROUS SUBJECTS: JAMES D. SAULES AND THE RISE OF BLACK EXCLUSION IN OREGON by Kenneth R. Coleman Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2017. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 240 pages. $19.95, paper. Discussions of race in Oregon almost inevitably return to the origins of the state’s overwhelming whiteness. Scholars and nonacademics who seek to explain Oregon’s striking lack of racial diversity look to the distant past, to its 1840s and 1850s statutes that prohibited African American migration and residence. Although the Oregon judiciary rarely enforced these anti-Black laws, and the Fourteenth Amendment nullified them in the 1860s, they seemingly cast a long shadow. African Americans continued to view Oregon as a bastion of white supremacy and largely avoided settling there. In Dangerous Subjects, historian Kenneth Coleman investigates this narrative of Oregon’s racial history and complicates it substantially. Coleman uses the life of James D. Saules, an early Black migrant to the Oregon Country, as a vehicle for exploring the origins of racial exclusion in the Pacific Northwest. Prior to Coleman’s research, Saules stood as a shadowy figure in the region’s early history. His involvement in the Cockstock Affair — an 1844 skirmish between Euro-Americans and Mollala people in Oregon City — and his later alleged threat to join Native resistance against neighboring whites, has long led historians to speculate that he was the inspiration for Oregon’s first Black exclusion laws. Coleman not only examines these two incidents and the anti-Black sentiment that swirled around them, he also reconstructs Saules’s life and places it in the broader context of settler colonialism that gave rise to a distinctly white supremacist legal and political regime in Oregon. What emerges from Coleman’s analysis is a complicated portrait of Saules as both an agent of empire who helped advance the United States’ conquest of the Pacific Northwest and a man who suffered from the colonial racial regime that arrived with Euro-American settlers. The documentary record on Saules is frustratingly thin, but Coleman conducts impressive detective work in genealogical sources, government records, and personal manuscripts to piece together the life of his enigmatic subject. He traces Saules’s origins to the burgeoning maritime industry of the U.S. Atlantic seaboard during the first third of the nineteenth century. Saules was a sailor whose career and travels frequently intersected with American imperial ventures. As a crew member aboard American whaling ships, Saules helped extend U.S. commercial power across the Pacific. Later, he played a more direct role in American imperialism by joining the United States Exploring Expedition (U.S. Ex. Ex.) as a ship’s cook. The voyages of the U.S. Ex. Ex. aimed both to collect data that could advance American commercial interests in the Pacific and to present a show of U.S. force to Indigenous people. As a member of the expedition , Saules may have participated in a string of violent encounters with Pacific Islanders, including massacres in Fiji and the Drummond Islands. When Saules finally deserted the expedition after his ship ran aground in the Oregon Country, he was already well versed in the workings of American colonial violence. Coleman ably demonstrates how Saules stood at the cusp of two modes of colonization in the Oregon Country. The first, merchant capitalism, had as its central aim the extraction of the Pacific Northwest’s wealth in animal pelts and exploited a diverse pool of non-white laborers. This was the world of the Hudson’s Bay Company with its small British population, multiracial workforce, and “middle ground” policies of compromise and accommodation with Native people. Overland migrations from the United States brought a new mode of settler colonialism, in which invading newcomers 430 OHQ vol. 119, no. 3 431 Reviews sought to displace and dispossess Native people , seize and settle their land, and exclude all but whites from access to productive property and political rights. Saules was able to make his way in the first colonial society by marrying a Native woman and engaging in small-scale commercial ventures such as ferrying and family farming. He fit less well in the new American regime that made whiteness a prerequisite...

The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages by Geraldine Heng

Reviewed by: The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages by Geraldine Heng Shyama Rajendran Geraldine Heng. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 504. $49.99. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages is ambitious in scope and impressive in breadth. In its deft synthesis of sources and previous scholarship, the book makes two major interventions: first, it provides one of the most comprehensive pictures of what "race" is and how it is defined in the premodern world; and second, it offers one of the most global perspectives on what "race" or the process of "race-making" looks like outside of the European context. Heng's book is an invitation to question the when, where, and why of premodern race and to consider deeper connections between how ideas of race are made in the past and [End Page 477] how they are made today. Moreover, by insisting on the analytical importance of the term race, Heng succeeds in conducting an incisive examination of the construction and maintenance of biopolitical structures of oppression in the premodern world; in doing so, she illustrates the virtues of interrogating the critical vocabularies that shape any given scholarly debate. Heng takes us around the world in this book, and the book itself is more of an exploration of multiple arcs of inquiry, rather than a single, straightforward trajectory. Her focus on case studies and her frank justification of this methodological decision are one of the book's greatest strengths. Heng writes in a way that easily allows readers to follow the multiple, intricate routes that she traces across the book; its apparatus is also helpful in this regard, with its well-chosen surveys of scholarship and its extensive bibliographical footnotes. Moreover, individual sections of the book are constructed in a way that allows them to be pulled out from the larger framework of Heng's argument and used in a range of undergraduate and graduate courses, or read on their own by specialists and nonspecialists alike. One of the book's exceptional accomplishments is that it illuminates an interconnected premodern world, one that is not always visible from the vantage-point of whatever corner of medieval studies any given scholar might occupy. Politically, Heng's work is a necessary call to accept that race existed in the premodern world (rather than continuing to debate whether it existed), to examine how racial regimes functioned in different premodern settings at different points in time, and to consider how such a deep historical examination might shed light on the making of race in the modern world. Heng focuses on "moments" and "instances" of "race-making," positing that race is the product of "specific historical occasions in which strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices and pressures, so as to construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment" (3). More important still, she argues for the usefulness of the term race (rather than terms such as "otherness" or "difference"), because the concept yields "tools, analyses, and resources, that can name the past differently" (4). This is particularly true when thinking about the emergence of "the European subject" between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, a development that Heng perceives as a connective tissue between "configurations of power," past and present (5). The first chapter, "Inventions/Reinventions," carefully traces how [End Page 478] race theory is "predicated on an unexamined narrative of temporality in the West" that discards medieval time as "politically unintelligible." This assumption effectively absolves the Middle Ages "of the errors and atrocities of the modern," while at the same time treating the errors and atrocities of the Middle Ages as insignificant to modernity (20–21). For much of this chapter, Heng outlines what she calls the "architectures that support the instantiation of race in the medieval period"; included in this category are: religion (particularly the fate of England's Jewish community and the "universalist ambitions" of the Latin Church), cartography (particularly the role that the mappa mundi played in the racialization of marginalized populations such as the Irish), and skin color (in circumstances in which it functioned ideologically as...

A post-apartheid paradigm? a view from the outside

The South African student movements of 2015 and 2016 have critically recalled the question: how to dismantle the thinking inherited from apartheid? More than twenty years after the fall of the racist regime, this question still haunt South African humanities. While the term “post-apartheid” might have addressed this urgency and even crystallized an intellectual ambition, it’s multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings have made it hard to establish a paradigm. The authors of this special section have sought to interrogate the use and abuse of the concept in the literature of their respective disciplines, keeping in mind that, whatever its polysemy, the term has become a reference point for the humanities worldwide, as untranslatable as it is inescapable.

Theorising Racism: <i>Exploring the Swedish racial regime</i>

Sociologists Bonilla-Silva and Baiocchi (2001) assert that sociologists, protected by a myth of neutrality and objectivity, follow the understandings of racism in their analysis of inequality as relegated to a secondary status, either according to the Marxist tradition as the superstructure or within a Weberian framework as a form of status difference. The aim of the article is to put the study of racism, a fundamental principle of social organisation in modern society, at the centre of social theory. The aim is also to develop a productive dialogue with the traditions of Critical Race Theory (CRT), neo-Marxism and Black feminism; traditions that we will argue are highly relevant for the analysis of the Swedish racial regime.

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life

As Allyson Hobbs writes in her fine new book, most of what we know about racial passing comes from literature and visual culture. But now, thanks to her creative mining of sources, we have a historical account and a method of thinking more deeply and precisely about the meaning of passing in a racialized society, where the lines and landmarks are always changing. The idea of traces is key here. The practice of passing relies on the erasure of precisely the kinds of evidence that historians typically require. Hobbs makes an art of following clues that have marked literature (e.g., Nella Larsen's Quicksand [1928] and Passing [1929]), painting (Archibald J. Motley Jr.'s An Octoroon Girl [1925] graces the cover) and photography (from P. B. S. Pinchback and Josephine Bruce to Fredi Washington and Jean Toomer) into the absences that hover on the margins of many black family stories. Asserting that “this is a book about loss,” Hobbs parleys these fragments and gaps into a nuanced narrative that reaches back to the colonial period and forward toward the challenges of racial identity in a post–civil rights twenty-first century (p. 4). Throughout, Hobbs refuses to look “down” on the experience of passing from the point of view of the racial regime but “bring[s] into focus what passers saw when they looked out onto their own worlds” (p. 17).

Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi's Closed Society and One Mississippi, Two Mississippi: Methodists, Murder, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in Neshoba County

Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi's Closed Society and One Mississippi, Two Mississippi: Methodists, Murder, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in Neshoba County

Fortunata, L'Africaine: Slavery and Semitism in Spain's Modern Empire

This essay recasts the central ideological opposition of Benito Pérez Galdós's Fortunata y Jacinta (1887) between the bourgeoisie and the sexually deviant Fortunata, in imperial terms, by exploring the novel's complex racial discourse, which encompasses allusions to Cuban slavery, as well as to an older racial regime concerned with questions of religion and lineage. The construction of bourgeois domestic ideology functions as an attempt to secure its identity as a modern and civilizing power, and is enacted upon the transatlantic stage of Spain's last iteration of its colonial empire. However, the bourgeoisie's continued profiting from slavery and the slave trade evokes an endemic sexual degeneracy and, echoing the Black Legend, raises the specter of its own Semitic heritage, thus undermining its normative identity.

Black soteriology: the physiological and ontological process

The Black experience that is historical and continues in post-oppressive and racist regimes proves to be problematic for Black existence. This is particularly so when one considers that the freedom posed by colourlessness and universalism of humanity is an irrational ideal, which works to undermine the level of Black historical oppression, and a denial of justice. This is linked to the untapped reconciliation of the chasm and dichotomy in Black ontological and physiological existence, where their humanity has to be reconciled in both these paradigms for authenticity and even more so for salvation. Such a need ushers in a soteriology that is dialectical in the quest for Black ontology and physiology to allow true affirmation, which is redemption, of Black humanity as Black before God and the world. This soteriology exists through Black theology and the notion of the Black church by encouraging a Black soteriological syllogism.