Mixed Race Studies

Mining the garrison of racial prejudice: The fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt and turn-of-the-century White racial discourse

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
1995

Robert Carl Nowatzki

This dissertation analyzes the fiction of Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932), the first black fiction writer published by a major American firm and widely reviewed and read by white critics and readers. My analysis focuses on the conflict between Chesnutt’s anti-racism and his attempt to make his critiques less threatening to his white publishers, critics, and readers. In order to demonstrate the ideological and discursive forces that Chesnutt resisted, I juxtapose his works with fiction and nonfiction prose by popular white authors and reviews of his work by white critics.

Chapter One provides the biographical, historical, ideological, and literary contexts of Chesnutt’s work. Each of the following five chapters examines one of Chesnutt’s books of fiction alongside literature by whites which deals with similar subjects and often expresses popular racist assumptions that Chesnutt’s fiction contests. Each chapter also demonstrates how white reviewers of his work often reiterated the racism that he resisted and dismissed him as a biased “Negro” author. Chapter Two interprets Chesnutt’s collection of plantation tales The Conjure Woman (1899) along with plantation fiction by Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris and pro-slavery nonfiction essays by Page and Philip Alexander Bruce. Chapter Three examines the treatment of miscegenation and depiction of mulattoes in Chesnutt’s collection of stories The Wife of His Youth (1899) in conjunction with anti-miscegenation literature by Page, Thomas Dixon, Jr., William Smith, and William Calhoun. Chapter Four focuses on the issue of passing and the “tragic octoroon” convention in Chesnutt’s novel The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and in novels by William Dean Howells, Gertrude Atherton, and Albion Tourgée. Chapter Five analyzes how Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition critiques the black disfranchisement, segregation, and racial violence defended by Page, Dixon, Calhoun, Smith, and Bruce. Chapter Six interprets Chesnutt’s critique of sectional conflict and the “New South Creed” in his 1905 novel The Colonel’s Dream along with Henry Grady’s 1886 “New South” speech and literature by Tourgee, Harris, Page, Dixon, and Bruce. Chapter Seven briefly surveys the neglect and subsequent recovery of Chesnutt’s fiction since his death, and emphasizes the importance of studying his work in its historical, ideological, and literary contexts.

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Racialised ethnicities and ethnicised races: reflections on the making of South Africanism

African Identities
Published online: 2012-06-21
DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2012.692550

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Professor in the Department of Development Studies
University of South Africa

This article discusses how the politics of South African identity-making continues to be spoiled by racialised and ethnicised identities cascading from colonialism and apartheid. These problematic identities continue to live on, raising sensitive issues of nativity versus settlerism as well as rights versus entitlement to resources. Identity issues cannot be understood without a clear historical analysis of politics of translating a geographical expression into a national identity that dates back to colonial encounters. The article unpacks complex nationalisms, namely Anglicisation, Afrikanerisation, and Africanisation, that operated as ID-ologies, i.e. identitarian quests for a shared identity, albeit mediated by notions of whiteness and blackness. These ID-ologies became sites of struggles mediated by vicissitudes of inclusions and exclusions. The question of who was the subject of liberation, who constitutes the ‘authentic’ subject of the nation, and who is entitled to resources such as land and mines remain contested. Whites use the constitution to claim rights and to maintain the status quo of privilege, whereas Africans try to mobilise notions of both rights and entitlements as part of the redress of past and present exclusions.

Introduction

This article traces the problematics of the idea of South Africa with a view to enlighten the current questions of belonging, citizenship, and ownership of resources rocking the country. It is a historical study that explores changing translations of a geographical expression into an identity of a people. The historical analysis slices right through the imperial and colonial encounters of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, right up to the present constructions of the ‘rainbow nation’. The main proposition of the article is thay South African national identity is, if not a failing national project, at least very much a contested work in progress, which is open to different interpretations and trajectories. This proposition is given credence by the fact that racialised and ethnicised identities formed under imperialism, colonialism, and apartheid continue to hang like a nightmare on the body politic of the rainbow nation, refusing to die. and continuing to throw up toxic questions around issues of belonging, citizenship, entitlement and ownership of resources like land and mines…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Afro-German project of Asoka Esuruoso and Philipp Khabo Köpsell

AfrokanLife
2012-04-15

Arriving in the future, Stories of Home and Exile will be an interdisciplinary approach to positioning. As a collection of poetry, short stories and academic essays on identity written by Black Writers who regard Germany as their home, and those who regard it as permanent or temporary exile, it will attempt to add a new layer to the debate and construction of Black Identity within the German context.

“There is an oversimplification of the Negro. He is either pictured by conservatives as happy, picking his banjo, or by the so-called liberals as low, miserable, and crying. The Negro’s life is neither of these. Rather, it is in-between and above and below these pictures.”
—Zora Neale Hurston 1944

What she speaks of is identity in its flattest form. The identity that people once saw when they looked at a black face, flat, blank, static, like a snap shot frozen in time. There was no breath behind the lips, no thoughts behind the mind. We were caricatures of ourselves, like a child’s drawing. It is a false image. Diversity and texture have been and continue to be at the core of Black identity. To be human is by definition to be complex. Yet the Oversimplified image persists, like a ghost that you just can’t shake, or a photo you can’t wipe free.

To escape simplification, new layers needed to be applied. From the African American Slave narratives quest for human dignity, to Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eye’s Were Watching God, Franz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, May Ayim’s Showing Our Colors and Blues in Black and White, and countless, countless more every literary generation has added a new layer to the image of Black identity and experience…

…However while anthologies of African American literature have been published since 1845, and African writers such as Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, Ama Ata Aidoo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (among others) have gained acclaim on the world stage, the writing and experiences of Black individuals within Germany has, even to this day, been largely ignored. Literary studies on Black Identity within the German context are still very few and far between, and the layers this Black German identity have added to the image of broader Black identity has often been overlooked.

“…und wenn Du dazu noch schwarz bist” (Edition Con) and “Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out” (Orlanda) in 1984 and 1986 were really the first testimonies on the lives of the African Diaspora in Germany to gain notice within mainstream German society. For Black individuals living in Germany – for those living in isolation – these publications became undeniable proof of the validity of their personal experiences. These texts offered a foundation for numerous other publications and further literary expression. They gave a deeper background and a clearer focus that allowed further perspectives…

…Parallel to the desire for societal acceptance a different question arose in the aftermath of this violence and rejection. Being a member of the African Diaspora, how does one definehome? For many people with African roots the concept of home and belonging can appear fragile. In the late 1990s, many Black authors negotiated this concept by depicting Africa as exile, utopia, or potentially a new/old place of belonging.

“I’m not at home/ still not at home/ not my country/ just my origin/ one of my origins” writes Olumide Popoola in her poem Nigeria – partly resigning, partly equivocating the concept of home…

Read the entire article here.

Branding Blasians: Mixed Race Black/Asian Americans in the Celebrity Industrial Complex

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
May 2012
235 pages

Myra Washington, Assistant Professor of Communication & Journalism
University of New Mexico

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communications in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Contemporary multiracial discourses rely on two overarching frames of mixed-race: mixed-race as uniquely new phenomenon and mixed race as resistant to dominant paradigms of race and racism. Both have been necessary for multiracial activists and the mixed race movement, and have served as the foundation for much of the current research in mixed race studies. This dissertation posits that a third frame exists, one that neither sees mixed-race as new or unique, nor as a racial salve to move the United States past the problem of the color line. This third paradigm is pluralistic, fluid in its ambiguity, and allows for the potential of ambivalence and contradictions within mixed-race.

This paradigmatic shifting view of race rearticulates what it means to be Black, Asian, Other, and results in the creation of multiracial/other subjectivities which can become a formidable obstacle to the racial order of the United States. Importantly, this dissertation argues Blasians trouble the logic of existing U.S. racial classifications, without establishing their own. Blasians (mixed-race Black and Asian people) are challenging the hegemony of race constructed around the lives of not just Blacks and Asians, but all members of U.S. society, as we are all embroiled in the illogical (and contradictory) discourses framing our identities.

I do not offer Blasians as a racial salve, as resistant to or prescription for either race or racism through virtue of their mixed-race bodies. Instead, I have used this dissertation to describe the emergence of Blasians, not to add to the research that divides monoracials from multiracials, but to muddle the lines between them. The analyses of these celebrities acknowledge that to understand what is a Blasian, means to first understand, and then complicate, hegemonic notions of race as it applies to both Blacks and Asians. Contextualized against those dominant discourses, Blasians explode the narrow boundaries of authenticity around racialized categories. Blasians, as I discuss them in this dissertation do not escape race, or erase race, but they do force the reconstruction of normative instantiations of identity.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Parading Respectability: An Ethnography of the Christmas Bands movement in the Western Cape, South Africa

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
May 2012
238 pages

Sylvia R. Bruinders

The Christmas Bands march through Adderley Street late at night during the “festive season” in Cape Town, 2001.
Picture by Henry Trotter. The author releases it to the public domain.

A Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology

In this dissertation I investigate the Christmas Bands Movement of the Western Cape of South Africa. I document this centuries-old expressive practice of ushering in the joy of Christmas through music by way of a social history of the colored communities. The term colored is a local racialized designation for people of mixed descent–often perceived as of mixed-race by the segregationist and apartheid ideologues. In the complexity of race relations in South Africa these communities have emerged largely within the black/white interstices and remained marginal to the socio-cultural and political landscape. Their ancestral area is the Western Cape where most still live and where several of their expressive practices can be witnessed over the festive season in the summer months from December through March. The Christmas Bands Movement is one of three parading practices that are active during this period.

Drawing on Foucault’s notion of “embodied subjectivity” and Butler’s work on gender and performativity, I explore three main themes, two of which are overlapping, throughout this dissertation. First, I investigate how the bands constitute themselves as respectable members of society through disciplinary routines, uniform dress, and military gestures. Second, I show how the band members constitute their subjectivity both individually as a member and collectively as a band; each has a mutual impact on the other. Even though the notion of subjectivity is more concerned with the inner thoughts and experiences and their concern with respectability is an outward manifestation of a social ideal, these two themes overlap as both relate to how the members constitute themselves. Third, I explore how the emergent gender politics, given renewed emphasis in the new South African constitution (1995) has played out in local expressive practices through the women’s insistence on being an integral part of the performance activities of the Christmas Bands Movement. Their acceptance into the Christmas Bands has transformed the historically gendered perception of the bands as male-only expressive forms. Furthermore, I will illustrate how this cultural practice has gained in popularity during the last seventeen years of democratic rule in South Africa, which may suggest that the historical marginality of the communities is still very present.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Race is a polysemic concept with a long and contested history. The term ‘race’ is dynamic and adaptable because it is not the core concept of racialised knowledge and thinking, that is to say ‘race’ has no causal properties. The concept and associated taxonomic devices, including categorisations of race, have no dynamic or processual power. The focus on ‘race’ misses both the production of knowledge about racialised things (entities, dynamics) and the locus of power in racial debates and theories. It is the active process of racism and racialisation that produce racist circumstances, situations, knowledge and beliefs. Racial categories are rather, abstract nouns that act as part of the linguistic architecture of racist knowledge by creating a set of artificial boundaries for knowledge and beliefs that are both fluid and contentious. The ‘new’ discourses of population ‘mixing’ are a reflection of these false population categories and their presumed borders, since both consensual and non-consensual assimilation/integration are a permanent feature of human history.

Hamish L. Robertson and Joanne F. Travaglia, “Racial ideology and the production of knowledge about health,” Darkmatter, Volume 9, Issue 1 (Post-Racial Imaginaries), (July 2, 2012). http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2012/07/02/racial-ideology-and-the-production-of-knowledge-about-health/

(An)Other English city: Multiethnicities, (post)modern moments and strategic identifications

Ethnicities
Volume 2, Number 3 (2002)
pages 321-348
DOI: 10.1177/14687968020020030301

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies
Duke University

The interpretive turn in urban studies signals a heightened emphasis on the locus of the city as the site for both the making and unmaking of identities and differences. Juxtaposing examples from British popular culture with narrative extracts from my published ethnographic research on ‘mixed race’ family and memory, this article addresses two key problematics associated with this discursive shift. First, I explore the concept of multiethnicity as another paradigm for understanding the relationship between structures and forms of agency, particularly as multiethnicity forces a rethinking of racialized and essentialist notions of Englishness and non-Englishness; what I refer to as differentiating between the hyphen and the ampersand. Second, I assess the extent to which lived and constructed ideas of `the urban’ in general and `the city’ in particular are preconditions for the performance of multiethnicity. That is, are urban sites ideal laboratories for an illustration of the ways in which `mixed race’ and multiethnic subjectivities are intertwined?

INTRODUCTION

Mulattos may not be new. But the mulatto-pride folks are a new generation. They want their own special category or no categories at all. They’re a full fledged movement. (Senna, 1998: 14)

For as long as humans have populated the earth, intergroup mating and marriages have been commonplace (Gist and Dworkin, 1972: 1). As such, it is argued that there are no discrete or pure biological ‘races’ (Rose et al., 1984). Yet, in the popular folk imagination as well as in interdisciplinary scholarship, the problematized idea of ‘mixed race’1 persists (Alibhai-Brown, 2001; Daniel, 2001; Parker and Song, 2001; Williams-Leon and Nakashima, 2001). In fact, not since the 19th-century Victorian era, when pseudoscientific treatises on the presumed social pathology of the ‘racial’ hybrid abounded, has there been such an academic interest in ‘mixed race’ studies. That said, the intellectual content and social and political contexts of contemporary scholarship are very different. Rather than being objects of the scientific gaze (as speaking subjects), scholars, many of whom identify as ‘mixed race’ or ‘multiracial’, have deployed the idea that ‘race’ is a social construct that shifts across space and time. In so doing, they seek to validate ‘mixed race’ as a legitimate psychosocial and political category.

Over the past decade, and particularly in North America, theoretical, empirical and biographical work on ‘mixed race’ that addresses the fluidity, dynamism, complexity and practices of identity politics has flourished. As we begin a new century, a body of writings is emerging that talks back and to the resurgent literature that gave birth to the ‘multiracial’ nomenclature and its contested politics (Christian, 2000; Gordon, 1995; Mahtani and Moreno, 2001; Masami Ropp, 1997; Njeri, 1997; Spencer, 1997, 1999). By critically engaging with either the problematics or the possibilities of ‘multiracial’ activism, expression and ideology, this latest phase signals the emergence of a critical discourse on ‘mixed race’ and ‘multiraciality’ from which there are no signs of retreat.

This empirical and experiential celebration and contestation of ‘mixed race’ and ‘multiraciality’ is by no means unified or essentialist. The most interesting debates have emerged from different conceptualizations of the canon. For example, conceptual and political disagreements over the categories ‘mixed race’, ‘biracial’ and ‘multiracial’ stem from the dominance of binary ‘black/white’5 paradigms in US and British ‘racial’ discourses (Leonard, 2000; Mahtani and Moreno, 2001; Price, 2000). The emphasis on socially designated ‘black/white mixes’ is said to exclude those who are socially designated and identify as dual minority ‘mixes’ that do not include ‘black/white’ and neglect certain individuals who claim triple or more ‘mixes’:

In the recent explosion of writings about multiraciality, we have seen a plethora of discussion about white/black crossings and white/Asian crossings (and we want to remind you that we are using these terms very suspiciously). But we worry that we have not yet seen a great deal of discussion about people who are of dual minority mixes, or who are not part white. (Mahtani and Moreno, 2001: 67)

This binarism also overlooks the important fact that conceptions of ‘race’, ‘mixed race’ and social status are historically, geographically and culturally specific and hence do not travel easily (Erasmus, 2000; Torres and Whitten, 1998; Whitten and Torres, 1998). The American ‘one drop’ rule, which subsumes anyone with at least one known African ancestor under the heading ‘black’ whether or not they also have European and/or Native American ancestry, differs remarkably from the more fluid notion of ‘race’ and social hierarchy in Brazil, wherein ascribed gradations between ‘black’ and ‘white’ are varied and many (Daniel, 2000; Twine, 1998; Winant, 1999). In a British context, ‘black’ as a collective ‘multiracial’ identification does not perform the same intellectual, political or cultural labour as it did in previous decades (C. Alexander, 1996; Gilroy, 1987; Mercer, 1994; Mirza, 1997; Modood, 1988). The fact that the Irish have ‘become white’ in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, along with recent racialized class and ethnic conflicts in the north of England as well as the current European/American rhetorical ‘clash of civilizations’ are all powerful indicators of the ways in which ‘blackness’/’non-whiteness’ and ‘whiteness’ are shifting and thus unstable signifiers of exclusion and inclusion (Bonnett, this issue; Hall, 2000; Hesse, 2000).

A broader historical and geographical vantage point also highlights the cross-cutting ways in which the global processes and erotic projects of slavery, imperialism and diaspora(s) have created similar shifts in the local making, management and regulation of status and power as articulated through the everyday discourses and practices of ‘race’, ‘mixed race’ and social hierarchies. These trends are manifest in the long tradition of intellectual engagement with issues of mestizaje (Latin America, Spanish Caribbean), métissage (French Canada, francophone Caribbean, francophone Africa), mesticagem (Brazil, lusophone Africa) and miscegenation (anglophone Africa, anglophone Caribbean, Australia) as comparative examples of scholarship on the contested notion of ‘race’ mixture. All of these interwoven and historically located positions rupture allegedly stable racialized fault lines and at the same time (paradoxically in the case of some) reinscribe ‘race’ – a term predicated on scientifically dubious criteria.

In the historical moments of slavery and imperialism, ‘mixed race’ communities were socially engineered and managed. Yet, it is worth pausing for a moment to ponder why the circumstances are ripe in certain contemporary social and political milieux for the (re-)emergence of a politicized ‘multiracial’ movement and not in others. For example, in the USA, organizations such as RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally) and AMEA (Association of MultiEthnic Americans) unsuccessfully lobbied the US Congress and marched on Washington demanding the inclusion of a ‘multiracial’ category on the 2000 census (Fernandez, 1996; Nakashima, 1996). Not wanting to upset the very powerful American caucuses of colour, in particular African Americans, as a compromise solution the Census Bureau introduced the ‘tick all that apply’ option which means that, for ‘statistical’ purposes, those who tick more than one box may be subsumed under one ‘racial’ heading such as ‘black’ or ‘African American’. On the other hand, in Britain, changing demographics suggest that ‘mixed race’ families and their children will be a formidable force in the future. Although this may be demographic fact, other than the support group People in Harmony, the ‘mixed race community’ displays minimal public signs of the degree of politicization evident across the pond. In fact, it was previous responses to the 1991 census as well as consultation with focus groups, and not external pressure, that motivated the Office of National Statistics to deploy the ‘mixed ethnic’ option with a free text field for the 2001 census (Aspinall, 1997; Owen, 2001). Since the 1970s, in Brazil, once heralded as a model of ‘racial’ democracy, political movements such as the movimento negro have re-emerged, suggesting that all is not well in ‘racial paradise’ (dos Santos, 1999; da Silva, 1999; Ribeiro, 1996). In (post-)apartheid South Africa, in light of the ‘official’ dissolution of apartheid categories and the everyday persistence of racism in the new guise of economic apartheid and heightened conflicts among and between Africans, Asians and ‘coloureds’, historically ‘coloured’ communities are having to redefine and reposition themselves (C. Alexander, 1996; Marais, 1996; Rasool, 1996).

Whatever the global context, political motivations for either the social engineering, suppression, dismantling or reconstruction of the ideas and practices of ‘mixed race’ are contingent. As Small reminds us: ‘the analytical enterprise . . . must continue to focus on structural contexts, institutional patterns, and ideological articulations as they are expressed in the light of local histories’ (2001: 129). ‘Multiracial’ or ‘monoracial’ identity politics is frequently governed by unresolved and played out tensions between the sovereignty of the state and the public sphere as they collide with both individualized expressions of multiethnic and/or ‘multiracial’ identities as empowerment, and monoethnic and/or ‘monoracial’ collective mobilization in the competition for economic resources and civic recognition (Body-Gendrot, this issue). This dialectical dance performed by structure and agency is succinctly described by Burroughs and Spickard:

There is a real split, then, as yet unresolved, between the compelling logic of multiethnicity and its promise for mixed individuals on the one hand, and the practical political imperatives of monoethnically defined groups on the other, in an age that has not yet wholly given up monoethnic definitions. (2000: 247)

In the second and third sections of this article, I will explore in greater detail the specific extent to which the restricted and racialized natures of ‘white’ English group membership and the compulsory ‘black’ non-English designation limit the ‘[multi]ethnic options’ (Waters, 1990; see also Song, 2001) of individuals who identify as ‘mixed race’ and/or multethnic as these affiliations and identifications are constructed, played out, maintained and transgressed in the specific contexts of ‘the urban’…

Read the entire article here.

I argue that this phenomenon of the conflation of Obama and Hitler channels racial anxieties, and even outright panic, about a ‘non-white’ president taking office. I situate this panic within ‘whiteness,’ and argue that it encompasses not just the fear of a ‘black’ president, but also the fear of unsettling the purportedly settled categories of race itself. This panic may be muted by the discourse of colorblindness and post-racialism, but finds voice in these ‘hybrid’ significations of Obama.

Cynthia D. Bond, “Fear of a ‘Black’ President: Obama, Racial Panic and the Presidential Sign,” Darkmatter, Volume 9, Issue 1, (July 2, 2012). http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2012/07/02/fear-of-a-black-president-obama-racial-panic-and-the-presidential-sign/

The aesthetic escape hatch: carnaval, blocos afro and the mutations of baianidade under the signs of globalisation and re-Africanisation

Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research
Volume 5, Issue 2, 1999
pages 65-98
DOI: 10.1080/13260219.1999.10431798

Piers Armstrong
Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil

This article examines the notion of baianidade, the cultural cosmovision traditionally associated with the state of Bahia and more specifically with the region of the Baía de Todos os Santos. A series of connotations for the term are examined, including cordiality, racial democracy and miscegenation. Through the cultural practice of baianidade, a social compromise is effected whereby material space and symbolic prestige are conceded to the black community in exchange for a relative political passivity. This exchange is not construed here as a conscious manoeuvre by the established powers, but rather in terms of the internal logic of an economy of symbolic capital. To exemplify both the fluidity and the semantic essentialism characteristic of baianidade, the article proceeds to the cultural semantics of the related term, baiana, a nominalized adjective which etymologically denotes a female native of the region, but by extension also denotes one among the various local religions and an associated culinary tradition. Against this essentializing consolidation, the article then considers contemporary uses of the term within a more individualistic consumer society. Finally, baianidade is compared synchronically to other major ideo-esthetic discourses of the Black diaspora.

Introduction: Bahian carnaval

The carnaval of Salvador, capital of Bahia State in Brazil, has grown immensely in popularity in recent years, so that it now rivals the more famous Rio carnaval in terms of numbers of visitors. Carnaval culture—music, dance, consumption and consequent entrepreneurial opportunities—has spread to the whole calendar of annual and weekly festivities, religious and secular, and has transformed Bahian society both in terms of its internal recreation patterns and in terms of its relations with external society. While the prominent traditional agricultural industries (cocoa, cattle, and vegetables) have encountered difficulties and contracted, tourism, largely based around carnaval or carnavalesque attractions, has increased spectacularly and become the centre of growth strategies. The old centre of Salvador has been transformed from extreme poverty and physical decay into the central tourist destination. Bahian pop music has penetrated the national and international markets. Bahian practices such as capoeira (martial arts dance) have spread around the world. An ever-growing number of international visitors (about 400,000 a year in a city of 2.5 million) arrive by plane, in search of cultural vitality and authenticity. The sheer volume of international visitors and the prominence of tourism as a source of new employment has also transformed local experience through personal exposure to foreigners with different ideas. A significant number of persons from previously completely marginalised classes have visited or lived in Western European countries as a result of this contact. While world globalisation (access and interaction between different locations) has been the pre-condition of the cultural marketing of Salvador to the world, the city itself has undergone globalisation in terms of qualitative culture as well as economic modernisation…

Read the entire article here.

Racial ideology and the production of knowledge about health

darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture
ISSN 2041-3254
Post-Racial Imaginaries [9.1] (2012-07-02)

Hamish L. Robertson
University of New South Wales

Joanne F. Travaglia, Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Health Services Research
University of New South Wales

Introduction

Racial terminology and its associated assumptions pervade the discourses of health policy, practice and research. The language utilised within and across these discourses emerge from both historical and current ideologies and approaches to the understanding and management of difference. As a result the language used reflects the inconsistencies ‘held’ within and between these ideologies. ‘Traditional’ racial or ethnic categories are juxtaposed with ‘mixed’ and hyphenated categories (such as ‘race/ethnicity’), which in turn have been at least partially deconstruction and problematised by post-colonial and critical race theorists. The concept of ‘race’ is mixed, moulded and blended as clinicians and researchers search for ways to describe human diversity.

In this article, we examine and unpack the conflation of contested and competing concepts of race with arguments from a critical perspective. We begin by briefly considering the origins of the concept of ‘race’. We then consider how ‘race’ is utilised in three areas of practice: research into and commentary on differential patterns of morbidity and mortality across population groups; the examination on the impact of social inequalities on specific groups and populations; and more recently, and most highly debated, explorations of the genomic links to prevalence of diseases.

Health, as well as other social systems (including education, economics and the law) utilise racial language to produce their own particular versions of injustices, at least in part by representing such language as ‘natural’ products of the ‘neutral’ findings of science. Through various examples, we show how these knowledge production processes not only create and legitimise such language, but adapt to utilise emerging science to support the perpetuation of these ideological positions over time. Just as in feminist critiques of gender the link between the presumed bio-genetic specificity and formal rigidity of ‘race’ and racialised inequality can be exposed as a discourse adaptively constructed through a centuries long politics of social categories, and the privileging of unproblematised medical narratives…

…Race is a polysemic concept with a long and contested history. The term ‘race’ is dynamic and adaptable because it is not the core concept of racialised knowledge and thinking, that is to say ‘race’ has no causal properties. The concept and associated taxonomic devices, including categorisations of race, have no dynamic or processual power. The focus on ‘race’ misses both the production of knowledge about racialised things (entities, dynamics) and the locus of power in racial debates and theories. It is the active process of racism and racialisation that produce racist circumstances, situations, knowledge and beliefs. Racial categories are rather, abstract nouns that act as part of the linguistic architecture of racist knowledge by creating a set of artificial boundaries for knowledge and beliefs that are both fluid and contentious. The ‘new’ discourses of population ‘mixing’ are a reflection of these false population categories and their presumed borders, since both consensual and non-consensual assimilation/integration are a permanent feature of human history…

Read the entire article here.