In this paper I examine the temporal dimensions of racialised and colonised embodiment. I draw on the work of Alia Al-Saji, whose phenomenological reading of Frantz Fanon examines the multiple ways in which racism and colonialism affix the racialised and colonised body to that of the past; a temporalisation that serves not only to anachronise these bodies, but also to close off their projective possibilities for being or becoming otherwise. Such a move reflects the nature of racialisation itself, which (...) following Charles Mills, does not just exteriorise or ‘other’ racialised bodies, but relies equally on a forgetting, or a disavowal and leaving behind of this very process. The result, I argue, is to render whiteness and white bodies as temporally present and even futural in their orientation, free from the vestiges of racism's history and free to adopt any number of stances on its continuing legacy. It is against this that I argue that the familiar exhortation to ‘get over’ racism whenever the charge is levelled, is not only dangerous in its denial of racism, but also disingenuous in purporting to move beyond a racially divided world, when in fact this very gesture serves to reinscribe differential racialised temporalities. (shrink)

This article is a critical interrogation of how gender and power figure in Swedish child welfare policy and the discourses on violence in intimate relationships vis-à-vis children exposed to violence. Drawing on feminist violence research, critical childhood studies, and intersectional perspectives, we identify a differentiation with racialised undertones in the understanding of violence as a social problem when related to children’s exposure. While predominately gender-neutral discourses of social heredity and epidemiology run through the material for the seemingly ‘universal’ child, forms (...) of violence ascribed to the presumed cultural Others link to gender, structural power and sexuality. The article concludes that gendered articulations of violence are restricted yet pivotal if children’s exposure is to be linked to issues of inequality and power. However, when gendering interlinks with racialisation, problematic differentiations of violence, childhoods and children are produced. (shrink)

This paper takes up Avtar Brah's (1999) invitation to write back to the issues she raises in her mapping of the production of gendered, classed and racialised subjectivities in west London. It addresses two topics that, together, illuminate racialised and gendered interpellation and psychosocial processes. The paper is divided into two main sections. The first draws on empirical research on the transition to motherhood conducted in east London to consider one mother's experience of giving birth in the local maternity hospital. (...) The maternity ward constituted a site where racialised difference became salient, leading her to construct her maternal identity by asserting her difference from Bangladeshi mothers and so self-racialising, as well as ‘othering’ Bangladeshi mothers. The paper analyses the ways in which her biography may help to explain why her experience of the maternity hospital interpellates her into racialised positioning. The second section focuses on media responses to the riots in various English cities in August 2011. It examines the ways in which some media punditry racialised the riots and inclusion in the British postcolonial nation. The paper analyses three sets of commentaries and illuminates the ways in which they racialise the debate in essentialising ways, reproducing themes that were identified in the 1980s as ‘new racism’ and apportioning blame for the riots to ‘black gangster culture’. While these media pronouncements focus on racialisation, they are intersectional in implicitly also invoking gender and social class. The paper argues that the understanding of the mother's self-racialisation is deepened by a consideration of the racialised discourses that can be evoked (and are contested) in periods of social unrest. The paper thus draws on part of the methodology of ‘The Scent of Memory’ in layering media readings and biographical narratives to analyse the contemporary psychosocial space of racialisation. (shrink)

Although particular political parties have succeeded in some countries, the Far Right has relatively little electoral support in most EU member-states. Yet what we can observe is a consensus over far-right ideas; fundamentally racialised concepts of the nation, tighter immigration controls, and less generous asylum regimes, which form part of the centre-right/centre-left contemporary mainstream.Focusing on the Far Right alone is to distort the question: a better formulated problem would be that of how the racialisation of Europe both prior to, (...) and as a corollary of the construction of the European Union, functions to set parameters to national political action.The messages conveyed by ‘tough’ immigration policies produced by mainstream parties for example, bolster the Far Right in its endeavour to racialise membership of the nation.The Far Right’s ideological ascendancy is thus a product of mainstream political ethics spiralling rightwards and historically backwards, rather than simply of pressure from the Far Right itself. (shrink)

This article provides a Foucauldian perspective on the racialised biopolitics of Islamophobia in the global north. It is argued that a pervasive, wide-ranging racialised logos is being used to unde...

When anti-racist protestors toppled the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol in June 2020, British political elites across the left-rights spectrum, despite acknowledging that a statue of a slave trader has no place in the contemporary politics, called to firm the application of law and order. Through the example of Edward Colston, the essay examines what Lacan’s idea of perversion can reveal about the power relations between political elites and anti-racist protestors. It opens by discussing the impossibility of ethics in (...) political contexts, before turning to the question of jouissance and its role in the creation of a racialised other and political institutions (and myths of white supremacy). If jouissance of the other racialises the other as deviant, pervert’s jouissance is de-personalised and made to follow “a greater good”. In doing so, the essay argues that perversion reveals the logics of racial hierarchies, which underpin and maintain modern society. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the friction between xenophobic discourses on migration and the crisis caused by the politics of austerity in Greece. On the one hand, an ‘excessive’ influx of migration is managed through violent means by the state and the para-state; on the other, a ‘scarcity’ of domestic resources is blamed for a ‘rise’ in racist attitudes, and the political ascent of a fascist movement-cum-parliamentary party, Χρυσή Αυγή (Golden Dawn). ‘Crisis’ is said to give rise to ‘austerity’—and hostility. (...) Inverting the inverted causal relationship between crisis, austerity and hostility, I problematise representations of hostility toward migrants which construct racism as a consequence of economic conditions or even as the antidote to the ‘bitter pill’ Greeks have been forced to swallow. I examine how racialised and gendered violence secures the politics of austerity in Greece. Specifically, through an examination of three eruptions of violence (the feminicidal acid attack on Konstantina Kouneva, the murder of Shehzad Luqman, and the drowning of eleven refugees near the island of Farmakonisi), I make concrete connections between the politics of austerity and what, drawing on Sara Ahmed, might be termed an ‘affective economy of hostility’ that articulates racialised and gendered modes of belonging and estrangement. Some bodies are rendered vulnerable and precarious, while others assert an entitled relation to national space while being economically disentitled by austerity measures. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Cet article étudie deux contextes français dans lesquels les voiles musulmans sont devenus hypervisibles: le débat public qui a mené à la loi française de 2004 interdisant les signes religieux ostensibles dans les écoles publiques, et le projet colonial français de dévoiler les femmes algériennes. Je montre comment le concept de « l’oppression de genre » s’est naturalisé au voile musulman d’une telle manière qu’il justifie les normes de féminités occidentales et cache le mécanisme par lequel les femmes musulmanes (...) sont racialisées. C’est ainsi que le voile devient le point de mire d’un racisme culturel qui se présente comme libérant les femmes musulmanes, un racisme qui semble poser un dilemme au féminisme. -/- // ABSTRACT: This paper examines two French contexts in which Muslim veils have become hypervisible as centres of contention: the public debate that led to the recent French law banning conspicuous religious signs in public schools and the French colonial project to unveil Algerian women. I ask how the concept of gender oppression comes to be naturalized to the Muslim veil in such a way as to simultaneously justify Western norms of femininity and hide the process by which Muslim women are racialized. It is in this way, I argue, that the “veil” becomes the focal point for a form of cultural racism that presents itself as saving Muslim women, and that it can be construed to pose a dilemma to feminism. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the structural domination of whiteness as it intersects with the potential of individual critique and reflexivity. I reflect on my positioning as a white nurse researcher while researching international nurse migration. I draw on two large qualitative studies and one small focus group study to discuss my reactions as a white researcher to evidence of institutional racism in the British health services and my growing awareness of how racism is reproduced in the British nursing profession.

This paper examines migrant women’s labour and the location of poor and racialised working women in the context of the contemporary care crisis. In the first part, I briefly reconstruct, the feminist critiques of the Marxist capitalist social (re)production theory and, the Decolonial and Postcolonial feminist criticisms of the Marxist universal model of the capitalist mode of (re)production and its conceptualisation of marginalised and excluded subjects. This analysis sets the ground for understanding the debts and innovations of Marx’s political economy (...) operated by the contemporary theory of care. In the second part, I focus on the embodied and affective experiences of poor, black, brown, and indigenous women to identify concrete mechanisms and relations of exploitation, oppression, and violence produced in the migration process to maintain global care chains. I base my analysis on a review of case studies of Mexican, Indian, and Filipina migrant women. Finally, I highlight the inherent ambivalences of global care chains as a process of both neo-colonial feminisation of migration and reproduction of neoliberal capitalism and as a shared context of struggle and resistance grounded in embodied and affective experiences. Keywords: feminisation of migration, reproductive labour, global care chains, racialized working women. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the processes of racialisation on the example of biomedical research. We argue that applying the concept of racialisation in biomedical research can be much more precise, informative and suitable than currently used categories, such as race and ethnicity. For this purpose, we construct a model of the different processes affecting and co-shaping the racialisation of an individual, and consider these in relation to biomedical research, particularly to studies on hypertension. We finish with (...) a discussion on the potential application of our proposition to institutional guidelines on the use of racial categories in biomedical research. (shrink)

Beauty is constantly lived and incorporated as a meaningful social category in Brazil and intersects with racialised and gendered ways of belonging to the Brazilian nation. In this article, I deploy ethnographic material to show how middle-class women self-identifying as black embody and experience beauty and how, through practices and discourses centred on physical appearance, they both reinforce and challenge broader social and racial inequalities in Brazil.

Ce livre qui a connu un certain écho éditorial pose des questions fondamentales à propos des sources sur lesquelles se fonde la démonstration de l’auteure, de ses présupposés théoriques et de la conduite de son argumentation. Françoise Vergès affirme « n’avoir fait ni enquête de terrain, ni recueilli de paroles de témoins » (p. 23). Elle s’est appuyée essentiellement sur le journal du Parti communiste réunionnais, « Témoignages », qui a produit des articles quasi-quotidiens entre décembre 196...

This book proposes an account of the place of the theory of race in Kant’s thought as a central part of philosophical anthropology in his political system. Kant’s theory of race, this book argues, is integral to the analysis of the “Charakteristik” of the human species and determined by human natural predispositions. The understanding of his theory as such suggests not only an alternative reading to the orthodox narrative we have seen so far but also reveals the underlying centrality of (...) the notion of human natural predispositions in a way that is consequential for Kant’s philosophy as a whole. What is the impact of Kant’s racial theory on his philosophy and political thought? Is Kant a consistent egalitarian or a partisan Universalist thinker? Is he the symbol of racist prejudices of his time? What is the influence of his racial hierarchy on his cosmopolitan right? Or more simply, is Kant racist? From a systematic examination of Kant relevant writings, this book provides answers to these questions and shed light on two fundamental problems of his theory of race for moral philosophy, namely: the completeness of the character of the White race and the dispossession of the character of the beauty and the dignity of human nature of the Negro race. These two issues, unperceived from the “orthodox” reading’s perspective, however, uncovered by the “heterodox” reading, not only shape Kant’s race thinking from the beginning to the end of his life, transform his cosmopolitan right into a non-universalist form of right, but merely define Kant as a fundamental racist thinker since he developed the anthropology, the philosophy, and the politics of racism in a systematic way. (shrink)

The presidential election of 2007 that sworn in Barack Obama as president of the United States of America heightened the idea that rightly, or wrongly, suggests the world has become post-racialised. I will explain how the notion of post-raciality is a distraction to the demands of racial diversity in the twenty-first century. I use the conversational thinking as an alternative method to show how the possibility of both nuances in the form of racial conflict/diversity can subsist. The difference I envisage (...) is that between highly melanated Africans and European Americans. Here, I argue that dialogue is still the most preferred option in racial conflict. However, the dialogue I propose is not a promise akin to the post-racialised, but a relationship that can exist in the midst of conflict, while at the same time acknowledging difference. (shrink)

Feminist investigations into caring technologies emphasise the tension between their reproduction of care’s assumed femininity and their ability to destabilise gendered markers and systems. However, the existing literature ignores the historical racialisation of care and its perpetuation in the form of the posthuman caring object. This article examines how racialised relations of power shape the posthumanisation of care in three science-fiction works, Channel 4’s television show Humans (2015), Alex Riviera’s film Sleep Dealer (2008) and Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013). (...) While Her’s disembodied operating systems are premised upon an implicit whiteness, posthuman caring objects in Humans and Sleep Dealer take a racialised, embodied form. Drawing upon the work of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, this article examines how the racialised objects in Humans and Sleep Dealer are constituted as both labourers and commodities, purchased for the purpose of facilitating white reproductivity. Nonetheless, this article also documents how these caring technologies complicate key binaries such as subject/object, human/machine and productive/reproductive labour. In doing so, they disrupt the whiteness of the social reproduction paradigm. The article concludes by calling for greater feminist engagement with the racialisation of care labour in human and posthuman forms, in order to challenge white, heterosexual models of reproductivity based upon the exploitation of racialised labour. (shrink)

Popular imaginings of Tanzania's Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Conservation Area are founded on the idea of wilderness preserved, but this conception of the ‘park’ is based in colonial-era race-thinking. Rather than simply a colonial-era manifestation of an apparently universal conservationist ideal, Serengeti and Ngorongoro are instead racial projects that embody the historical and ongoing processes of racial formation. The creation of Serengeti and Ngorongoro enabled a racialisation of nature, a process begun by the British and reinscribed via safari (...) ever since. Recognising this racialisation of nature has larger implications for not only the treatment and perception of those in the Global South, the racialised ‘other’ to the Global North, but also for the realities of white privilege and constructions of whiteness. (shrink)

Steve Biko is one of the most important liberation activists of his time. Yet, his theoretical contribution is not well understood or appreciated. This article reconstructs Biko’s political ideas and introduces a new integrated reading and interpretation of his writings, speeches, and recorded interviews. It argues that Biko’s Black consciousness ideal should not only be read as engaging an activist movement or programme but, also, as encompassing an original theoretical framework grounded in a communalist ethos of Biko’s own conceptual development. (...) It argues that Biko’s Black consciousness ideal sought to relate racialised oppression to a historically centred communalist solution framed by two interlocking structural elements—rightful power and free community. The article argues that only by a theoretical and normative consideration of these elements, on Biko’s own conceptual terms, do we get a coherent understanding of Biko’s distinctive view of free postcolonial society. (shrink)

MAPEDZAHAMA V, RUDGE T, WEST S and PERRON A. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 153–164 [Epub ahead of print]Black nurse in white space? Rethinking the in/visibility of race within the Australian nursing workplaceThis article presents an analysis of data from a critical qualitative study with 14 skilled black African migrant nurses, which document their experiences of nurse‐to‐nurse racism and racial prejudice in Australian nursing workplaces. Racism generally and nurse‐to‐nurse racism specifically, continues to be under‐researched in explorations of these workplaces; when racism (...) is researched, the focus is nurse‐to‐patient racism and racial prejudice. Similarly, research on the experiences of migrant nurses from a variety of ethnicities in Australia has tended to neglect their experiences of the social dynamics of the workplace, thus reinforcing their racialisation. When racialised, the migrant nurse becomes ‘the problem’ through a focus on English language competency and ensuing communication barriers. This paper applies Essed’s framework of ‘everyday racism’ to theorise narratives of racism by black African migrant nurses in Australia. In so doing, it not only brings to the fore silenced discussions of nurse‐to‐nurse racism in Australia, but also exposes the subtle, mundane nature of contemporary racism. For this reason, while the data we present must be read within their context, that is, the Australian nursing workplace, it has significance for advancing a critical analysis of racialised minority groups’ experiences of racism within seemingly ‘race‐less’ nursing workplaces internationally. (shrink)

This article illustrates how racial capitalism can enhance understandings of data, capital, and inequality through an in-depth study of digital platforms used for intervening in gender-based violence. Specifically, we examine an emergent sociotechnical strategy that uses software platforms and artificial intelligence chatbots to offer users emergency assistance, education, and a means to report and build evidence against perpetrators. Our analysis details how two reporting apps construct data to support institutionally legible narratives of violence, highlighting overlooked racialised dimensions of the data (...) capital generated through their use. We draw attention to how they reinforce property relations built on extraction and ownership, capital accumulation that reinforces benefits derived through data property relations and ownership, and the commodification of diversity and inclusion. Recognising these patterns are not unique to anti-violence apps, we reflect on how this example aids in understanding how racial capitalism becomes a constitutive element of digital platforms, which more generally extract information from users, rely on complex financial partnerships, and often sustain problematic relationships with the criminal legal system. We conclude with a discussion of how racial capitalism can advance scholarship at the intersections of data and power. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the notion of ‘reasonableness’ that is, for many, at the heart of the Philosophy for Children approach particularly and education for democratic citizenship more broadly, is constituted within the epistemology of ‘white ignorance’ and operates in such a way that it is unlikely to transgress the boundaries of white ignorance so as to view it from without. Drawing on scholarship in critical legal studies and social epistemology, I highlight how notions of reasonableness often include (...) consensus, ‘racialised common sense’ and the ‘typical’ view. In addition the promotion of particular dispositions on the grounds of ‘reasonableness’ both promotes stability and limits how one may think otherwise. Thus, P4C practices that fail to historicise, examine and challenge prevailing notions of reasonableness establish an epistemically ‘gated’ community of inquiry. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the fact that AI is predominantly portrayed as white—in colour, ethnicity, or both. We first illustrate the prevalent Whiteness of real and imagined intelligent machines in four categories: humanoid robots, chatbots and virtual assistants, stock images of AI, and portrayals of AI in film and television. We then offer three interpretations of the Whiteness of AI, drawing on critical race theory, particularly the idea of the White racial frame. First, we examine the extent to which this (...) Whiteness might simply reflect the predominantly White milieus from which these artefacts arise. Second, we argue that to imagine machines that are intelligent, professional, or powerful is to imagine White machines because the White racial frame ascribes these attributes predominantly to White people. Third, we argue that AI racialised as White allows for a full erasure of people of colour from the White utopian imaginary. Finally, we examine potential consequences of the racialisation of AI, arguing it could exacerbate bias and misdirect concern. (shrink)

In the coming months and years, the left faces a historic juncture. On the one hand, racist violence is on the rise across the West, and the political class seems intent on mobilising both overt and subtle racism. On the other hand, strategies of anti-racist organising, which have developed on both sides of the Atlantic, have reached a theoretical impasse. I argue that now, more than ever, a serious project of historical and intellectual retrieval is necessary. This article interrogates the (...) theoretical limitations of ‘anti-blackness’ as an analysis of racialised oppression. Through the thought of Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko, among others, I argue that theories of ‘anti-blackness’, specifically those rooted in Afro-pessimism, are predicated on a theoretical shift away from relational social theory to identitarian essentialism which obscures, rather than illuminates, the processes of racialisation which undergird racial oppression. (shrink)

Since coming to power in 2010, the UK Coalition government has enacted a series of cuts to public spending, under the auspices of austerity. Underpinning these cuts is a neo-liberal model of citizenship, in which citizens are expected to be autonomous, independent and economically productive, and in which the responsibilities of citizenship outweigh the rights. This model of citizenship is characterised by a paradoxical approach to social reproduction. The Coalition government has taken a significant interest in social reproduction as a (...) means of creating the next generation of ‘good’ neo-liberal citizens; yet, the current austerity measures involve the withdrawal of state support for social reproduction activities. Drawing on participant observation carried out with migrant women's groups in Sheffield and Manchester, as well as interviews with group members, this article demonstrates how the government's paradoxical approach to social reproduction, combined with gendered and racialised discourses of citizenship and ‘Britishness’, have led to policies that place ethnic minority migrant women in an untenable situation. The social reproduction activities of ethnic minority migrant women are the subject of intense government interest, because of the concern that they will be unable to produce ‘good’ neo-liberal citizens. In some cases, this has led to government policies clearly intended to dissuade ‘undesirable’ migrants from having children. In other cases, migrant women are expected to show their commitment to integration, both for themselves and their children, specifically by learning English, even as the government has drastically cut funding for English as a Second or Other Language (ESOL) classes. While seemingly paradoxical, this is in keeping with a racialised neo-liberal model of citizenship under which the ‘responsible’ migrant mother should be able to parent and learn English without government assistance. Nonetheless, these policies are actually self-defeating, as they prevent migrant women from exhibiting the very characteristics of neo-liberal citizenship that they are ostensibly trying to encourage. (shrink)

Christian ethical imagination was always tempered by various social prejudices prevalent in local contexts. Particularly during modernity and subsequently through colonial expansion, the role of race and caste became central to the expansion of Christianity through missionary activity. A closer scrutiny of colonial missionary Christianity clearly suggests the significance of racialised worldview shaping theological and ethical paradigms. In particular contexts, such racialised imagination underpinned and gave credence to other forms of social prejudices, such as caste in South Asia. Through a (...) post-colonial lens, I examine the role of race and caste in shaping Christian ethical frameworks and articulate the rationale for ‘decolonising’ the modern foundations of Christian ethics in pursuit of racial justice in our contemporary society. (shrink)

This article examines which lessons political philosophers can learn from discussions within Critical Philosophy of Race. The article assumes a social-constructionist understanding of “race” and focuses on the question of how we can reconcile normative universalism with sensitivity to differences that have been created by processes of racialisation. To answer this question, it looks exemplarily at debates within three different fields of political philosophy: normativity, politics, and law. First, it presents objections voiced by critical race theory against liberal, ideal (...) conceptions of justice. Second, the article reconstructs the main arguments for and against affirmative action as a policy measure directed at minority groups. Third, it focuses on racial inequalities in the context of penal law. By way of conclusion, it suggests how debates around justice and punishment and the conceptual lenses offered by CPoR can be fruitfully applied to the German context. (shrink)

Since its publication in 1985, Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain has become a seminal text in the study of embodiment. In its foregrounding of the body in war and torture, it critiques the minimising of the body in questions of politics, offering a compelling account of the structure and phenomenology of violent domination. However, at the same time the text can be seen to shore up a mind/body dualism that has been associated with oppressive forms of gendering, racialisation (...) and disablement. Divisive, powerful and elegant, the text has been central in the shaping of approaches to embodiment over the past 30 years. This special issue revisits Scarry's text in the light of 30 years of scholarship on embodiment and the body. Its legacies and limits are exemplified through a series of articles that mobilise the arguments of The Body in Pain even as they push at the limits of the text. (shrink)

In this article, I use a Marxist feminist methodology to map the organisation of migrant sex workers’ socially reproductive paid and unpaid labour in one city and country of arrival, London, UK. I argue that unfree and ‘free’ labour exists on a continuum of capitalist relations of production, which are gendered, racialised, and legal. It is within these relations that various actors implement, and migrant sex workers contest, unfree labour practices not limited to the most extreme forms. My analysis reveals (...) that many migrant sex workers have very limited ‘freedom’. This is in stark contrast to the classical liberal claim of sex worker rights activists and academics that the vast majority of migrant sex workers are free, and therefore not coerced, exploited or trafficked. I then consider whether the emerging labour approach to trafficking could help achieve ‘freedom’ for migrant sex workers. Advocates argue that anti-trafficking efforts must, and can, be refocused on extending minimum labour and social protections to all vulnerable workers. I argue that this approach is disconnected from material interests and history. Rather, migrant sex workers, sex worker rights activists, and all migrant and citizen workers and activists globally must collectively organise against ‘labour unfreedom’ and hence for meaningful control over their labour and lives. (shrink)

This article discusses findings of a qualitative study on strategies of othering observed in anti-immigrant discourse, by analysing selected examples from the UK and Polish media, together with data collected from interviews with migrants. The purpose is to identify discursive strategies of othering, which aim to categorise, denigrate, oppress and ultimately reject the stigmatised or racialised ‘other’. We do not offer a systematic comparison of the data from the UK and Poland; instead, we are interested in what is common in (...) the discursive practices of these two countries/contexts. In using newspaper together with interview data, we are combining representation and experience in identifying not only strategies of othering, but also how these are perceived by and affect the othered individuals. The paper uses the following data: 40 newspaper articles – 20 from the UK and 20 from Poland, and 19 interviews – 12 from Poland and 7 from the UK. The analysis that follows identifies five shared strategies of othering: a) Stereotyping; b) Whiteness as the norm; c) Racialisation; d) Objectification; e) Wrongly Ascribed Ethnicity. We conclude with the research limitations and outlining possible next stages, such as working with a larger corpus, investigating frequency, or including other media genres. (shrink)

The UNESCO Statements on Race of the early 1950s are understood to have marked a consensus amongst natural scientists and social scientists that ‘race’ is a social construct. Human biological diversity was shown to be predominantly clinal, or gradual, not discreet, and clustered, as racial naturalism implied. From the seventies social constructionists added that the vast majority of human genetic diversity resides within any given racialised group. While social constructionism about race became the majority consensus view on the topic, social (...) constructionism has always had its critics. Sesardic (2010) has compiled these criticisms into one of the strongest defences of racial naturalism in recent times. In this paper I argue that Sesardic equivocates between two versions of racial naturalism: a weak version and a strong version. As I shall argue, the strong version is not supported by the relevant science. The weak version, on the other hand, does not contrast properly with what social constructionists think about ‘race’. By leaning on this weak view Sesardic’s racial naturalism intermittently gains an appearance of plausibility, but this view is too weak to revive racial naturalism. As Sesardic demonstrates, there are new arguments for racial naturalism post-Human Genome Diversity Project. The positive message behind my critique is how to be a social constructionist about race in the post-genomic era. (shrink)

In United Nations (UN) human rights reporting and analysis, ‘honour’ has been systematically conflated with ‘honour-related violence’ (HRV). However, honour and HRV are not the same thing. In this article I examine contemporary UN human rights discourses around honour. I argue that these discourses are underpinned by racialised and orientalist-colonial imaginaries which falsely categorise people and places as either having or not having honour. This conflation presents honour as a cultural problem attributed to racialised communities mostly associated with the Muslim (...) World. Adopting a critical post- and de-colonial perspective, I undertake a discourse analysis of UN human rights documents to expose orientalist tropes that reproduce epistemic and material violence against honour. There are three strategies employed to commit this violence: first, through the reduction of honour to physical and emotional HRV—a violence predicated upon the logic of coloniality and the orientalist division of the world into modern and pre-modern states; second, by associating honour as violence with Muslims and migrant communities, the discourse furthers structural Islamophobia; third, by reproducing colonial saviour narratives that designate honour as control over women’s sexuality. The human rights discourse on honour forecloses upon alternative ways of understanding what honour is and means for those who live with it. As such, the international human rights discourse on honour extends the coloniality of power and the geopolitics of knowledge. (shrink)

Drawing on respective ideas from within both liberal political philosophy and Frankfurt School critical theory, this paper seeks to examine claims about autonomy and empowerment made on behalf of educational policies such as teacher-led codeswitching; a policy that seeks to empower students from racially marginalised groups by facilitating their proficiency in the language and cultural expressions of societally dominant groups. I set out to evaluate such claims by first sketching two competing formulations of autonomy; namely, liberal autonomy concomitant to political (...) power, and autonomy that arises out of the practice of critical self-reflection. I proceed by testing codeswitching within each formulation to reveal how – in this case – these two conceptualisations of autonomy are educationally incompatible with each other. I conclude by suggesting that educational interventions such as codeswitching may ultimately be complicit in the longer term processes of racialisation and marginalisation that they seek to diminish, not only because they carry the potential to damage minority students’ self-integrity, but also because they limit possibilities for both majority and minority students to engage in dialectical encounters that may open avenues to new principles of social and political organisation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis commentary questions the presumption in genetic research that a biological connection exists between populations identified as Jewish. The author emphasises that identifying individuals as Jewish based on biological criteria is a sociological process that can draw attention away from other social mechanisms affecting identity construction. She also encourages critical consideration of the possible racialised thinking behind genetic anthropology studies, and the language used to express genetic findings. In conclusion, she calls for a radical cultural shift in the kind of (...) knowledge valued as significant, relevant, and beneficial to the people on whom genetic ancestry studies are carried out and she asks for attention to the political contexts surrounding all such research. (shrink)

Le passé de l’Occident reste marqué par une tache indélébile, celle de l’horreur de l’esclavage colonial. Il est certes aujourd’hui avéré que la traite atlantique ne fut que l’une des traites négrières, à côté de la traite arabe au travers du Sahara et le long des côtes de l’océan Indien, qui s’étale sur une plus longue durée, et des traites africaines internes au continent... Mais en elle s’exprime un scandale spécifique, celui de la contradiction entre une pratique et des idéaux (...) proclamés, qui furent d’abord ceux d’une religion à vocation universaliste prônant l’amour du prochain, puis ceux issus des Lumières, dont l’application fut loin d’être immédiate. En outre, concentrée sur une période de temps plus brève – en gros trois siècles et demi, du début du XVIe au milieu du XIXe siècle –, la traite atlantique a alimenté en force de travail servile non pas des sociétés à esclaves, comme le furent les sociétés arabo-musulmanes, mais des sociétés esclavagistes, dont le caractère totalitaire résultait d’un mode de production tout entier fondé sur l’utilisation d’une main-d’œuvre dégradable autant que l’exigeaient les contraintes des cultures de plantation, vouées à la satisfaction de marchés extérieurs , et donc sur une marchandisation et une réification de l’homme sans précédent. Ce qui en fait un phénomène éminemment moderne, en contrariété avec les usages antiques ou non occidentaux, caractérisé par une racialisation de l’oppression, avec la mise en place d’un préjugé de couleur qui servit de légitimation commode, sous le couvert de la nature, à une forme d’exploitation qui aurait pu paraître condamnable en fonction des valeurs religieuses et politiques officiellement affichées. (shrink)

This article reviews four recently published books which help to deepen one’s understanding of the various ways white Christians (mostly in America) have often unknowingly propagated a form of Christianity that is built on a foundation of ‘whiteness’. While each book is aimed at different audiences, they collectively offer a substantive introduction to the nature of theological discourse around race and the challenges of confronting a racialised Christian mindset. Whether it is Willie Jennings’s unmasking of the white male values of (...) self-sufficiency and mastery in higher education, Miguel De La Torre’s scathing appraisal of the ways white Christians contributed to the spectacle that was the Trump presidency, Esau McCaulley’s demonstration of the valuable insights gained when the biblical text is interpreted by non-whites, or the diverse scholars gathered by Love L. Sechrest, Johnny Ramírez-Johnson and Amos Yong, it is clear that churches (and the theologians who serve them) will need to reckon with what it means to fulfil their calling in a way that faithfully attends to the concerns addressed by people from non-white backgrounds. (shrink)

In the labour-history of the US, the systematised management of workers is widely understood as emerging in the decades after the Civil War, as industrial production and technological innovation changed the pace, nature and organisation of work. Though modern management is seen as predating the contributions of Frederick Taylor, the technique of so-called 'scientific management' is emphasised as the particularly crucial managerial innovation to emerge from the US, prefiguring and setting the stage for Fordism. This article argues that the management (...) of labour in the US has roots in the particularities of a society which racialised its labour-systems – slave and free – and thus made 'racial knowledge' central to managerial knowledge. Rather than transcending the limits of racial knowledge, the authors argue that scientific management relied on experts to know and develop 'the races' not only for the purpose of accumulating capital but also for the organisation of modern production through the first decades of the twentieth century. Such 'knowledge' became central to the export of managerial and engineering knowledge from the US to the world. (shrink)

In July 2015, Rihanna released a seven-minute long video for her new single, entitled ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ (more widely known as ‘BBHMM’), the violent imagery in which would divide feminist media commentators for its representation of graphic and sexualised violence against a white couple. The resulting commentary would become the focus of much popular and academic feminist debate over the intersectional gendered and racialised politics of popular culture, in particular coming to define what has been termed ‘white feminism’. (...) ‘BBHMM’ is not the first time Rihanna’s work has been considered in relation to these debates: not only has she herself been very publicly outed as a survivor of male violence, but she has previously dealt with themes of rape and revenge in an earlier video, 2010’s ‘Man Down’, and in her lyrics. In this article I explore the multiple and layered ways in which Rihanna, and by extension other female artists of colour, are produced by white feminism as both responsible for perpetrating gender-based violence, and as victims in need of rescue. The effect of such liberal feminist critique, I argue, is to hold black female artists responsible for a rape culture that continually subjects women of colour to symbolic and actual violence. In this context, the fantasy violence of ‘Man Down’ and to a greater extent ‘BBHMM’ dramatises the impossibility of ‘being paid what one is owed’ in a culture that produces women of colour’s bodies, morality and personal trauma as abjected objects of consumption. I read these two videos through the lens of feminist film theory in order to explore how such representations mobilise affective responses of shame, identification and complicity that are played out in feminist responses to her work, and how their attachment to a simplistic model of representation conceals and reproduces racialised relations of inequality. (shrink)

While the Euromodern model of the nation-state has been the subject of unremitting, exhaustive and merited political criticism, this article advances an anti-anti-statism. Oriented by warnings of theorists who have advanced plurinational states, creolising the nation, separating states from nations and abolishing the state, I turn to Fanon's insistence that states be re-envisioned beyond Cold War alternatives and narrowing nationalisms; Cabral's modelling of political unity on an effective football team; and Gyekye's suggestion of deliberately forging meta-national states. I argue that (...) we need the institutional rejection of states reliant on racialised enslavement and colonialism as the exclusive custodians of bestowing and withholding political recognition. We must also premise rightful belonging not only on historical group identities but on how these are expressed in records of political activities demonstrating commitment to the cultivation and extension of national consciousness or the meta-state as the basis of political legitimacy. (shrink)

This paper examines the relations and the tensions between debility and disability in global contexts defined by complex forms of bio-social precarity. My focus is Baan Kamlangchay, in Thailand, a care home providing care for older people with dementia and Alzheimer's disease from the global North. I treat Baan Kamlangchay as one concrete example of emerging circuits of transnational care/reproductive labour in order to investigate the interrelations between disability and wider global bio-political inequalities. Using the concept of ‘biolegitimacy’, I discuss (...) the power dynamics in the relationships between the racialised and gendered care workers in the centre and (white) disabled residents. I argue that debility, understood as the flexible gradation of dis/ability and in/capacity, allows us to better understand these novel forms of embodied precarity and their political implications in global contexts. (shrink)

An important edited collection on US and European migration policies as vehicles or factors of institutional racism are dealt with in this review-essay. In the context of recent literature on migration, Pietro Basso’s State Racism proposes a specifically Marxist approach and represents a sharp critical analysis of the ongoing surge in racism sweeping across Western Europe and North America by offering an investigation into the authoritarian, racialising, and elitist drift of Western democracies and societies. Particular importance is given to the (...) spread of hostility towards migrants among native workers, often due to a condition of isolation, weakness, and vulnerabilities produced by the failures of trade unions and political organisations of the working class. The essays in the collection point towards ways in which these can be effectively thwarted and blocked by renewing collective struggles and solidarity, arguing that solidarity can stimulate the development of anti-racism based on the unity of the working class, capable of combating all types of discrimination through self-organisation, equality, and cooperation between migrant and native workers in the common struggle to assert needs and rights. At the present conjuncture, workers across borders can be the carriers of a new form of civilisation, liberated from the supremacy of the commodity and of money, from the exploitation of labour, and from racism and sexism. (shrink)

L’article, pensé « à chaud » après la tragédie qui a commencé à Paris le 7 janvier 2015, cherche à substituer un vocabulaire alternatif d’analyse des événements aux proclamations de certains politiques – souvent vides et hypocrites – appelant à « éviter l’amalgame ». Il montre qu’il est nécessaire de pluraliser et de complexifier notre lexique pour désigner des phénomènes qui relèvent avant tout du politique et des crises d’un monde commun et profane. L’article s’achève en ouvrant une perspective d’analyse (...) socio-historique sur la façon dont la racialisation de l’« islam » et du « religieux » rejoue un refoulé colonial. (shrink)

The following essay investigates the animating force of jester-humour and trickster-critique as necessary components of prophetic consciousness and social movement. Climate change devastation coupled with racialised socio-economic predation today faces social movement with a stark demand. The root-work necessary enjoins challenge of human presumption about the meaning of life at the most basic level. The locus from which such a depth-exploration will be elaborated here is postindustrial Detroit, on the part of a poet-activist-educator who will insist that ‘jesterism’ as ‘prophetic (...) animation’ cannot merely be ‘talked about’, but begs performance and embodiment – even in the process of writing and theorising. Indigenous wisdom and folk spirituality will supply historical perspective in asserting laughter as both antidote to trauma and tactic of critique – whether looking at traditional African practices of tricksterism reincarnate in everyday street life in Detroit, medieval Christian celebrations of the Feast of Fools subverting official Church orthodoxies in feudal Europe, or the postmodern insurgence of hip-hop beats and tags in challenging corporate gentrification and church capitulation at the emblematic heart of de-industrialisation. (shrink)

In this article, I propose to look at the organisation of reproductive labour in the ‘global North’ through a lens of epistemic ignorance. Focusing on the process of outsourcing, I argue that it creates forms of irresponsibility, and with it, epistemic ignorance. The devaluation of domestic work and the degradation of domestic workers is shaped by gendered and colonial ideologies, and Western epistemologies. These epistemologies underpin a strong subject/object split and buffer the denial of existing interdependencies. I problematise those epistemologies (...) by drawing on feminist care ethics, accounts of relational selves and relational responsibility, and alternative epistemologies. Grounding that discussion on vignettes from an in-depth study of heterosexual couples in Austrian households who outsource domestic work, I argue that the systematic failure to see what and who we are connected to in the domestic realm is shaped by gendered and racialised privilege, and driven by an epistemology of separation. My argument will unfold in two steps. First, I use the concept of the skin as an example of how the beliefs in an independent, autonomous self and a strong subject/object split disguise connectedness and relationality. This leads me to the second step, in which I explicate my notion of semipermeable membranes – a thinking together of ontological permeability and ethical responsiveness. I argue that active forms of ‘unknowing’ at work in ‘mundane,’ everyday, domestic performances have far-reaching consequences. (shrink)