Body Race Research Articles

COVID Roundtable

COVID Roundtable

The deep border

Deep neural network algorithms are becoming intimately involved in the politics of the border, and are themselves bordering devices in that they classify, divide and demarcate boundaries in data. Deep learning involves much more than the deployment of technologies at the border, and is reordering what the border means, how the boundaries of political community can be imagined. Where the biometric border rendered the border mobile through its inscription in the body, the deep border generates the racialized body in novel forms that extend the reach of state violence. The deep border is written through the machine learning models that make the world in their own image – as clusters of attributes and feature spaces from which data examples can be drawn. The ‘depth’ that becomes imaginable in computer science models of the indefinite multiplication of layers in a neural network begins to resonate with state desires for a reach into the attributes of population. The border is spatially reimagined as a set of always possible functions, features, and clusters – as a ‘line of best fit’ where the fraught politics of the border can be condensed and resolved.

“We the North”? Race, Nation, and the Multicultural Politics of Toronto’s First NBA Championship

The Toronto Raptors’ 2019 National Basketball Association (NBA) championship win, a first for the franchise and for a Canadian team, “turned hockey country into basketball nation” ( CBC Radio 2020 ). Canadians’ burgeoning embrace of the team and the sport seemed to point to a growing celebration of Blackness within the nation. However, we problematize the 2019 championship win to tell a more expansive story about how sport and national myths conceal truths about race and belonging in Canada. We explore two particular cases—the “We The North” campaign and the media coverage of Raptors superfan Nav Bhatia—to highlight the contradictory ways that the Raptors coverage mobilized symbols of the North and multiculturalism to present the team as quintessentially Canadian and rebrand basketball for Canadian audiences. We further explore how these stark contradictions manifest in the racialized policing of basketball courts in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). These cases demonstrate that the celebrations of the Raptors and basketball not only continued to police racialized bodies, but also ensured that their inclusion was contingent on the maintenance of the status quo.

Drilled Mountains, Pulverised Bodies: Mining, Extractivism, and Racialisation in Brazil

In this article, I analyse how a focus on cumulative violence grants us a new perspective on extractivism that discloses its link to the larger project of the construction of racialised, extractable, and disposable bodies. By engaging with Robert Nixon’s call to think about new ways to represent cumulative violence and with Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s assertion about how subscribing to a geological inertness can generate a different relationship to temporality, I will discuss how two distinct objects – the poem “A montanha pulverizada” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade and the photographs by the Brazilian artivist Júlia Pontés – can help us think about mining and extractivism by and through the textual and material forms of art. While the first allows us to discuss how the usual discussions around extractivism that are focused on on the catastrophe can obscure its inherent tie to racialised bodies, the latter can help us think of a possible approach to extractivist violence closer to the idea of the cumulative quasi-event. Finally, I argue that Pontés’s photographs engage with the geological in a way that questions the very cleavage between life and nonlife and the fears evoked by the idea of an apocalyptical barren Earth.

Theatre as Service … My Experience During the Global Pandemic in Canada

Perhaps the global pandemic (COVID-19) and the death of George Floyd have brought an immense, drastic, and unprecedented turn in human history. Many disciplines are now being intentional about asking critical and ethical questions around race, identity, social justice representation, and systemic change. The same is true for theatre and performance. While events in 2020 stretched and burdened racialized bodies, they also provided opportunities for many racialized bodies to be recognized perhaps because of their knowledge, experiences, identities, and the power and privileges they hold or do not hold. As an African in the Canadian theatre sector and scholarship, I acted in different capacities to address systemic injustice in Canada’s theatre scene during the pandemic. For instance, I co-facilitated some sessions with colleagues from Indigenous, Black, and People of Colour (IBPoC) community for the purpose of creating space for dialogue on issues of concern to this community. In this article, I reflect on how the pandemic produced an initiative that has the potential to address leadership challenges within the performing arts sector.

The Politics of Resistance From Within

Everyday racism embedded in all facets of society, coupled with ongoing injustices against racialized people globally, have reignited an urgent action to turn the gaze within social work education. There is a need to challenge and resist white supremacy that continues to institutionalize systemic racism and justify state control of social and political processes. These current realities are in direct contradiction to the neoliberal push for state withdrawal from social programming and essential services. Yet the interconnectedness between neoliberalism, white supremacy and fascist ideologies has gone undetected in social work circles resulting in a political and ideological vacuum in the profession. Within the social work curricula, there is a lack of attention and involvement to effectively dismantle white supremacy and racism that are perpetuated within and through the profession. The social work classroom has been a natural place to incubate a new wave of resistance that has the potential of changing the face of the profession. Considering the deleterious effects white supremacy has for racialized bodies within academic spaces, we assert the embodiments of resistance with a call to action for social work scholars, students, administrators and practitioners. These key actors must reject the legacy of white supremacy in our profession that acts as social control agents serving the state's interests and perpetuating its hegemony. We explore some of the ways in which we confront and disrupt white supremacy, which includes interrogating and dismantling dominant discourses, systemic and institutional academic racism (teaching, research and service), social work curriculum and priorities, and racist classroom dynamics that have been shaped by whiteness that continues to impact the interactions between racialized and white students and professors. We conclude with a call to infuse social work with practices and approaches that equip students with knowledge and tangible tools to enact change beyond academic spaces.

à prova de balas? necroinfâncias cariocas, violência de estado e filosofias da rua

This essay aims to reflect on the impacts of state violence upon black lives and childhoods. In the wanderings through the city of Rio de Janeiro and in the theoretical trails proposed by antiracist and decolonial thinkers, we discuss the impacts and challenges of racism in the formative and existential itineraries of racialized bodies, crossed by the public necropolitics that provides the premises of the pedagogical government of peripheral childhoods and adolescences in large Brazilian cities. From the bumping into M., 11 years old, who sells chewing gum in the surroundings of a train station in Rio de Janeiro, we problematize the vulnerabilities produced and the systematic violations of the black children’s human rights, which hinder racial justice in the country, in face of the permanent conversion of differences into inferiorized inequalities. The violence of this injustice, according to the argument developed in the text, culminates in the reinforcement of the vilification and naturalization of racial inequalities against populations historically inferiorized by the colonial wrath. It also points to the need to think about black childhoods from the territory, in order to problematize inequities and disparities that persist. We conclude, finally, that the capture and nullification of black childhoods is a State project, guided by criminalizing and stereotyping practices of subjectivation which brutalize bodies and dehumanize black lives.

“We Foreigners Lived In Our Foreign Bubble”: Understanding Colorblind Ideology In Expatriate Narratives1

Racial colorblindness—the desire to not “see color”—or avoiding any use of the term “race” itself, has been an antiracist imperative in post‐WWII Sweden in order to leave behind the prior era of eugenics and racial thinking. Through a multi‐sited linguistic ethnographic study, this article examines how 46 returning Swedish expatriate women talk about race and whiteness in race‐related experiences and interactions, using colorblind language. By analyzing the implicit contextual associations and dissociations made between race, language, subjectivity, and nation, a system of ideas and cognitive structures mapping perceptions and constructions of the world is exposed; of national belonging, racialized bodies, racial hierarchies, and perceptions of the West itself. In their migrant narratives, however, the categories used could be ascribed opposite meanings, depending on subjectivity and context. In this logic, language and nationality becomes “visible” or “hidden” depending on time and place, while “visible whiteness” can be associated with either an undesirable sense of difference or a set of unspoken privileges.

Materialization of racialized surveillance: Lived experiences of home imprisonment

Racialization, surveillance, and securitization may be distinct theoretical concepts, but they are nevertheless significantly intertwined. Race, as a mode of thinking and governance, largely informs the practices of securitization, whereby surveilling racialized bodies is an immanent task of the securitization process. To demonstrate this relationship, I interviewed three of the men from the infamous Canadian “Secret Trial 5” Security Certificate cases and their family members. I investigate their lived experiences of home imprisonment, examining how their home became a key site for the operation and deployment of racialized surveillance. Their experiences illustrate how surveillance emerges as a practice of securitization, where racialized “Others” are reaffirmed as threats to and subjects of unfettered surveillance practices. As the only research endeavor to interview Canada’s security certificate detainees and their families, this article demonstrates how securitization materializes through the transformation of the home into a prison; this is achieved through the imposition of carceral practices and a penal architecture within the home and through eroding belonging and safety for the people living under this type of regime. Moreover, given that most studies focusing on the experiences of securitization are restricted to the experiences of the incarcerated individuals, these studies often exclude, and by extension, silence the voices of the families also touched by these processes. Thus, this article illuminates that, albeit, in different magnitudes, families also undergo the pains of imprisonment.

Racial formations as data formations

This commentary uses Paul Gilroy’s controversial claim that new technoscientific processes are instituting an ‘end to race’ as a provocation to discuss the epistemological transformation of race in algorithmic culture. We situate Gilroy’s provocation within the context of an abolitionist agenda against racial-thinking, underscoring the relationship between his post-race polemic and a post-visual discourse. We then discuss the challenges of studying race within regimes of computation, which rely on structures that are, for the most part, opaque; in particular, modes of classification that operate through proxies and abstractions and that figure racialized bodies not as single, coherent subjects, but as shifting clusters of data. We argue that in this new regime, race emerges as an epiphenomenon of processes of classifying and sorting – what we call ‘racial formations as data formations’. This discussion is significant because it raises new theoretical, methodological and political questions for scholars of media and critical algorithmic studies. It asks: how are we supposed to think, to identify and to confront race and racialisation when they vanish into algorithmic systems that are beyond our perception? What becomes of racial formations in post-visual regimes?

Abandoning the SRO: Public Health Withdrawal from Sanitary Enforcement in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

This paper situates a ten-year period of political upheaval in addressing the problem of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) housing in Vancouver, Canada, within an epistemic transformation of public health. Until 1970, the Vancouver Health Department exemplified a colonial history of public health in establishing the city's skid road as a cordon sanitaire. But the 1970s saw a sudden fading of the Department's authority just as a more collaborative approach to housing policy was emerging. The sunsetting of sanitary enforcement was driven in part by the arrival of a "new public health" that became primarily concerned with defining public health problems and solutions through the regulation of racialized bodies and behaviors-a cordon thérapeutique. By the 1980s, this shift constituted an epistemic and regulatory abandonment of SRO housing, leading to the accelerated deterioration of the entire housing stock and costing incalculable human suffering and the loss of lives.

Islam, Gender and Self: Rethinking Transnational Belonging and Intersectional Experiences of Tamil Muslim Women in Singapore

Much has been written about Tamil diaspora as well as Muslim women in Singapore, but only separately. This exploratory article would aim to fill that empirical gap by focusing on a detailed ethnographic study of Tamil Muslim women in Singapore as gendered racialized bodies, thus examining the actualities and dilemmas of being visibly transnational Muslim women in a diasporic space by unpacking the interconnections between identity and belongingness. This work uses a trans-local lens to understand the transnational experiences and hybridized shape-shifting identities of Tamil Muslim women in a diasporic space like Singapore, thus reconceptualizing transnationalism and diaspora. Using an intersectional lens also gives a new edge in addressing the multiple loopholes and interconnections that come together to impact the everyday experiences of Tamil Muslim women in Singapore. This research would thus contribute to feminist literature and (Tamil diaspora) diaspora literature by exploring intersections of identities such as race, religion, and gender that interplay in relation to transnational belongingness from a female standpoint, that of the Tamil Muslim women in Singapore based on the everyday experiences and realities of the social structure within their local environment.

Stories of Antiracist Theory, Instruction, and Practice: A Review Essay

Stories of Antiracist Theory, Instruction, and Practice: A Review Essay José Luis Cano Jr. Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. By April Baker-Bell. New York: Routledge, 2020; pp. 128, $44.95 paper. Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory. By Aja Y. Martinez. Champaign, IL: Conference on College Composition and Communication/National Council of Teachers of English, 2020; pp. 201, $34.99 paper. Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics. By Louis M. Maraj. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2020; pp. 208, $25.95 paper. I believe that we’ve all been telling stories all along, but some stories are elevated to the status of theory, scholarship, and literature, while, too often, minoritized perspectives are relegated to marginalized or overlooked “cultural rhetorics” methods or genres. –Aja Y. Martinez, Counterstory1 An Itchy Story: Y Sigue La Comezón I start with a story. Immediately after graduating from high school, two of my friends and I decided to take a road trip to explore a little bit of the US—I think we had watched too many white folk movies and their liberating road escapades. We hopped in the car and got to it. I drove while my two friends sat in the passenger seat and the back seat. It’s important to note racial and linguistic compositions. I pass off as white-ish when I’m in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas because I’m lighter complected, but once out of the Valley, I’m mostly Brown. My friends [End Page 107] have darker complexions, so they don’t pass off as white anywhere. We possess these complexions and speak with a certain “Valley accent.” So about four hours on the road, a cop caught us speeding. It’s my first ticket, so I’m not sure what to expect. An older white officer, probably in his fifties, walks toward us, positions himself slightly behind the driver’s window, and interrogates us. We respond by informing him that we’re stopping in a few places, but Pennsylvania serves as our final destination. My friend on the passenger side adds that his tía will host us over there, so that’s where we’ll be staying several nights. We wait for a response while the officer pieces this information in his head. As we wait, my friend on the passenger side scratches his upper right calf with his right hand. It turns out to be a horrible time to get an itch. The officer immediately yells, “Get your hands where I can see them!” My nervousness turns to terror, so I place my hands on the steering wheel, gripping it as if I’m holding a weightlifting bar with 300 pounds on it. The officer explains, “That’s how you get shot, son!” I feel my heart beating throughout my body. My hands tremble. I get the infraction slip and drive off. I call my parents to let them know I got a ticket but don’t elaborate on the incident. Talking about the infraction slip as a souvenir, my dad jokes, “Bueno, ya tienes un recuerdito del viaje.” In educational settings, I used to frequently think: Where do these stories belong? In my own field of rhet-comp, I contemplate how to make the connection between composing practices and the criminalization of racialized bodies. Here’s a preliminary response. In comparison to white folks, students of color receive less education yet more criminalization, so the composition course should concern itself with understanding how these students of color fail to reach/enroll in these courses, or once there, how these courses sometimes propagate similar stances. That is, the composition course should understand racism in white America. For the rhetoric component, I consider how to embed the above story as a rhetorical event and interaction, so I learned to use the word “democratic.” Understanding this aforementioned story in relationship with other stories complicates and advances democratic practice in the US—patriotism at its finest. In “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Black gender and race theorist Sylvia Wynter asks in 1992, If, as Ralph Ellison alerted us in his The Invisible Man, we...

Racialized geographies of housing financialization

Financial violence is racial violence: geographies of housing financialization spatialize hierarchies of death-dealing racial difference. However, research concerned with housing financialization rarely addresses the inextricable relationship between racism and capitalism. Racial division and subordination have always been necessary to producing value in real estate; financialization materially reproduces racial capitalism by reconfiguring the death-dealing abstraction of racism from systems of individual bias and racialized bodies into automated systems. Rather than reducing racially subordinated communities to experiences of oppression and domination, producing life-giving geographies of housing requires bringing collective resistance for emancipatory social change into the analytic frame.

‘Teaching shouldn’t feel like a combat sport’: how teaching evaluations are weaponised against minoritised academics

ABSTRACT In the Australian Higher Education sector, the gendered, racialised, and heteronormative culture of neoliberalism means that for minoritised teachers the university classroom is always a contested, and often hostile, space. Our gendered and racialised bodies become objects under the gaze of our students and the deafening headwinds of post-truth anti-intellectualism render our stories difficult for our students to hear. This paper probes our experiences as minoritised educators who through a decolonial framework, actively challenge deeply entrenched narratives through critical teaching and consider how that translates into student feedback. We employ a collaborative autoethnographic approach to offer an understanding of how Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) are used as a tool of disciplinary control in the neoliberalised university. We argue that SETs are racialised and gendered tools of power that can be hostile and biased towards minoritised teachers, and urge reconsideration of their overuse in higher education.

The Politics of Vulnerability ed. by Estelle Ferrarese

Reviewed by: The Politics of Vulnerability ed. by Estelle Ferrarese Sanna Karhu (bio) Estelle Ferrarese ed., The Politics of Vulnerability London & New York: Routledge, 2018; 131 pp. The concept of “vulnerability” has become an academic buzzword over the last few decades in the fields of social theory, political philosophy, and feminist scholarship. The concept is used in multiple ways to address different contemporary political problems ranging from social and economic marginalization and violence to global wars. One of the most well-known theoretical contributions to the concept of “vulnerability” is Judith Butler’s (2004, 2009) famous account of bodily vulnerability as a generalized state of bodily life. While for Butler vulnerability operates as a physical and affective condition for the ethics of nonviolence, for critics of vulnerability, such as Alan Badiou (2001), Bonnie Honig (2010), and Jacques Rancière (1999), the concept risks substituting politics with ethics due to its emphasis on emotions and care. Challenging the idea that vulnerability belongs solely to the ethical sphere, The Politics of Vulnerability seeks to foreground vulnerability as a political question. As Estelle Ferrarese asks in the introduction of the volume: “How could an ineradicable, universal phenomenon pertaining to human nature become the object of a critique, or be the wellspring of emancipation? How does the idea of a fundamental human vulnerability enable us to account for socially produced or configured forms of vulnerability?” (5). Answering these questions is one of the central tasks of the book, which consists of seven essays that were originally published in Critical Horizons (2016). Throughout the anthology, [End Page 280] understandings of and meanings given to vulnerability vary, refusing any clear-cut definition of the concept. For some scholars, it is associated with the question of everyday life, such as practices of care (Laugier, Ferrarese). For others, it refers to the politics of concepts: to injurious speech acts that govern racialized bodies (Michel), or to the urgency of re-politicizing the concept of “victimhood” (Cole). One of the main strengths of the volume lies in the scope of the essays: the question of vulnerability permits a broad range of topics and problems to be discussed under one heading. However, the first three essays, although otherwise important contributions, do not concentrate on the concept of vulnerability or the politics of vulnerability and thus do not directly respond to the main questions of the volume. These essays discuss vulnerability in a more implicit manner, highlighting forms of economic precarity (Castel) and the everyday practices that make some lives more susceptible to violence and death than others (Das and Deutscher). In his essay “The Rise of Uncertainties,” which provides a summary of the main theses of his book of the same name, Robert Castel discusses new forms of economic insecurity related to precarization by analyzing the negative impacts of global finance capitalism on workers (specifically in France). Castel focuses particularly on the emergence of a new class, the “precariat” who work atypical and temporary jobs, and demonstrates how it has become a permanent stratum of the division of labor. With the weakening of worker protection laws and social benefits, the precarization of work has led to the peculiar situation wherein the same individual can be both an underpaid worker and a welfare recipient. As Castel concludes, the degradation of the wage-earner system can marginalize certain populations by making it impossible for them to achieve the status of a “responsible individual”—a normative requirement of modern liberal states. Although Castel does not use the term “vulnerability,” his analysis of precarization powerfully shows that addressing the economic dynamics of the neoliberal state is necessary for any theory of vulnerability. Veena Das’s article provides an insightful reading of J.M. Coetzee’s novels Waiting for the Barbarians and Diary of a Bad Year in light of the Wittgensteinian notion of “forms of life,” interpreted through Stanley Cavell’s work. Whereas for Cavell the meaning of words and concepts depends on particular cultural contexts and shared customs, rules, and habits, that is, on shared forms of life, Das puts more emphasis on the ways in which practices of violence can disrupt the assumption of shared meanings, and thus turn forms of life...

THE IDENTITY OF THE “NEW ADAM” IN LESLEY MARMON SILCO’S NOVEL “GARDENS IN THE DUNES”

The article is devoted to the study of the uniqueness of conquest messianism, which is the basis of anthropomorphic nationalism of the literary process of the XIX – first half of the XX century, which contributed to the usurpation of American identity by images of a Christianized Edward Palmer. A review of scholars’ ideas on trends in the interpretation of modern literary works by authors of Indian origin is analyzed. It is noted that many literary critics point to cosmopolitanism as a useful concept for expanding and developing areas of postcolonial research, research within geographical and literary boundaries, and perhaps most provocatively, the study of North American Indians and Indigenous people. The presence of anti-American themes that sharpen the reader's attention against the European educational configuration of racial bodies and diseases is highlighted. An attempt has been made to clarify the understanding of true values by representatives of European and North American imperialism and Native Americans. The analysis of the given textual examples proves that there is a special emphasis on issues related to identity, culture and society in the context of increasing transnational mobility, technological progress and globalization. The article notes that the colonial invaders endowed America's alien and ecologically distinctive landscape with tropics in order to bring it as close as possible to the tropical Eden they had longed for on a new continent, instead of becoming a tropical hell created by colonial contacts, evictions, forced relocations, and expulsions of Native Americans from their sovereign lands.

POR UMA LINGUÍSTICA APLICADA ANTIRRACISTA, DESCOLONIAL E MILITANTE: Racismo e branquitude e seus efeitos sociais

: In the field of Brazilian Applied Linguistics there are some researches (XXX, 2016b; FERREIRA, 2015; MUNIZ, 2016, 2020; NASCIMENTO, 2019, 2020; SOUZA, 2011, 2020) that mobilize the categories of language, identity and race in a nested way. In addition, in our area, we have had an increasingly decolonial turn (XXX, 2016a) that has sought “alternatives, without the purisms or fundamentalisms characteristic of coloniality, for the construction of decolonialities in the understanding of the world and social life” ( GUIMARAES; VESZ, 2019, p. 7-8). In this sense, this article argues in favor of an antirracist, decolonial and militant Applied Linguistics. To this end, I conduct a discursive-pragmatic analysis of the textual trajectory of speech acts related to black and white racial identities on Facebook in order to demonstrate the relationships between language, coloniality, whiteness and racism as well as the need for a decolonial perspective of language in LA . As theoretical-methodological contributions, I have based on linguistic research in the applied field that has focused on the relationships between language, racism and (un) colonialities (PINTO, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014a, 2018; MUNIZ; 2016; NASCIMENTO, 2019), the authors / authors of contemporary decolonial criticism (FANON, 2008; KILOMBA, 2019; MIGNOLO, 2006; QUIJANO, 2010) as well as in analytical categories from linguistic anthropology (BAUMAN & BRIGGS, 1990). I concluded that our linguistic practices are racialized and therefore language cannot do without being analyzed in its articulation with colonial processes and with the forms of subjectivity that participate (r) am in the construction of racial bodies and identities throughout the world-system -patriarcal-capitalist-colonial-modern (GROSFOGUEL, 2010). Keywords: Applied Linguistics Antirracist; Whiteness; decoloniality.

Racial Capital, Abolition, and a Geographic Argument for Reparations

AbstractTracing the development of Lehman Brothers from their roots as a dry goods store in Montgomery, Alabama, into a Fortune 500 global financial services company that collapsed in the 2007 financial crisis reveals the contours of US‐style racial capitalism. We highlight how race and capital are geographically rooted in the United States. At the heart of our argument is an understanding of the geographic imperative of capital which creates and exploits differences to wrench capital’s profits from the blood, sweat, and toil of racialised bodies. Perhaps most geographically significant, we advance a second, interrelated argument, the geographic case for reparations. By arguing the system itself is entirely and wholly wrapped in race in ways that extend and advance practices of exploitation, we understand reparations that do not fundamentally undermine, transform, destabilise or smash the system as doomed to be short‐term solutions to long‐term structural problems.

Football after fragmentation: brain banking, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and racial biosociality in the NFL

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes relationships between brain banking practices, football-related head trauma research, and the production of “racial biosocialities”—forms of group affiliation that are constituted through experiences of bodily suffering and shaped around racialized health disparities. The head trauma crisis raises questions about the sustainability of football that will require new strategies for managing the vitality of racial bodies while simultaneously warranting the consumption of harm to these same bodies. I argue that brain banking potentially supports these strategies by publicizing new systems for testing and prevention that reify neoliberal conceptions of personalized risk management and informed choice.