Critical Race Theory

"Obama and the ‘Arab Spring’: desire, hope and the manufacture of disappointment. Implications for a transformative pedagogy"

by John Schostak

paper just published with co-author Lorna Roberts. It develops themes and arguments in earlier conference versions available on academia.edu: see: ‘Democracy matters in race matters’: Obama, desire, hope and the manufacture of disappointment.

For a period, in the run up to the election (2007–2008) and the months after the election, the name ‘Obama’ signified... more For a period, in the run up to the election (2007–2008) and the months after the election, the name ‘Obama’ signified hope for millions, not just in America but across the world. As the hope turned to disappointment, the financial crisis deepened and the Arab Spring renewed a call for a ‘humanity’ that could transcend the differences of nations and faiths. What can be learnt from such events about the pedagogies of hope, disappointment and public action? Are there lessons for a transformative pedagogy, an education that could underpin and continuously create the conditions for a politics of freedom and social justice? A range of print, broadcast and digital/Internet news media is analysed to explore the political/rhetorical/pedagogical strategies already set into play that ‘manufacture disappointment’ in order to undermine and negate the transformative, transgressive symbolic significance of ‘Obama’ and thus manage the theme of change to reassert the same.

Development Dissonance: Israeli Development in the Negev and its Impact on the Bedouin Indigenous People

by Elisha Baskin

This paper explores the national development policies of the Southern Negev desert in Israel and its impact on the... more This paper explores the national development policies of the Southern Negev desert in Israel and its impact on the Bedouin indigenous population who inhabited the land before the state came into existence. While Israel is amongst the developing nations of the world and is deeply committed to sustainable development, when comparing and contrasting the definitions of sustainable international development with Israeli perceptions of sustainable development, it becomes clear that development designated for the Negev region is not geographically defined, but rather designed to selectively benefit the Jewish inhabitants of the Negev, thus revealing a development dissonance. This paper examines the Israeli development dissonance, exploring the wide gap between Israel's development achievements and capabilities and its development policies in the Negev that undermine principles of equitable and sustainable development.

Commemorating Quebec: Nation, race, and memory

by Darryl Leroux

This is my PhD dissertation, a copy of which is available on Digital Dissertations or send me an email for a copy.

COMMEMORATING QUEBEC: NATION, RACE, AND MEMORY

This study focuses on discourses of nation, race, and memory... more COMMEMORATING QUEBEC: NATION, RACE, AND MEMORY

This study focuses on discourses of nation, race, and memory in present-day Québec society through an analysis of the celebrations of Québec City’s 400th anniversary in 2008. My analyses locate these commemorative practices within the broader context of a perceived crisis of Québécois identity. I identify the modes through which difference was discursively constructed in relation to culture, race, and gender in Québec. I then adopt a theoretical framework that examines the relationship among public commemoration, nation-building, and subject formation in Québec. Specifically, I examine the high-profile Rencontres spectacle, several museum and art exhibits, a theatrical production, a number of musical concerts, a variety of policy documents, various protocol events, and the Québec nationalist and anarchist protest movements in relation to each other.

I argue that the Québec 400 is best understood as a set of subject-making practices that sought to define an ideal Québécois subject through norms of belonging that prioritized French colonial heroes and subjugated indigenous and non-French Others. Commemorative practices at the Québec 400 celebrations articulated the liberal discourse of cultural pluralism common in Western liberal democracies post-1980s in ways that effectively positioned the normative Québécois subject as the enlightened, generous, and reasoned patron of cultural diversity. Commemoration also operated as a creative, festive, spectacularized, and thus seemingly innocent mode of constituting national subjects in 21st century Québec, relying as it did on territoriality and kinship relations to interpellate subjects into a national project in Québec and to locate them in a hierarchy of belonging.

The Québec 400 was also characterized by the performance of intimate relationships between France and Québec throughout 2008. The transnational dimensions of the normative Québécois subject were premised on a shared understanding of the
colonial-settler project in Québec, organized around notions of whiteness, civilization, and territory

Québec Nationalism and the Production of Difference: The Bouchard- Taylor Commission, the Hérouxville Code of Conduct, and Québec’s Immigrant Integration Policy

by Darryl Leroux

For those following politics in Québec, the 2007-2008 period was an opportune time to conduct research on the dynamics... more For those following politics in Québec, the 2007-2008 period was an opportune time to conduct research on the dynamics of race and national identity. This paper follows a path through a number of events during this period in order to tease out the various dimensions of discourses about difference in Québec. I start with the proclamation of the Hérouxville Code of Conduct in January, 2007. From there I introduce the much talkedabout
Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences (formed in February, 2007, and co-chaired by Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor), which tabled its final report in May, 2008. I next analyze the Government of Québec’s new immigrant integration policy, released in October, 2008.

This paper presents and analyzes these three “events” in relation to the emerging academic literature on the politics of multiculturalism in Western liberal democracies. In particular, I argue that through relying on a civilizational discourse that depoliticizes “difference” in culture, the various events appeal to the dominant understandings of difference in Québec society, thereby obfuscating the racialized dimensions of these discourses. In order to situate my analyses, I begin with an overview of debates on cultural pluralism in Québec.

Sunera Thobani, Exalted Subjects: Studies In the Making of Race and Nation In Canada

by Darryl Leroux

Race', normativity and the history of sexuality: Magnus Hirschfeld's racism and the early-twentieth-century sexology

by Heike Bauer

Participating in Beauty Culture by Grace Yia-Hei Kao

by Feminism and Religion

originally published on the Feminism and Religion Project

At the most recent Society of Christian Ethics annual meeting, I got into an impromptu late night discussion with... more At the most recent Society of Christian Ethics annual meeting, I got into an impromptu late night discussion with several women friends about why some of us participate in “beauty culture” and how we feel as feminist Christian ethicists and moral theologians about our decisions. Each of us shared why we have chosen to wear make-up (or not), keep up with fashion (or not), dye our greying hair to mask the signs of aging (or not), or put in the effort to maintain a certain physique (or not). We also addressed what role our own mothers and larger communities have played in our decision-making processes.

Since it is certainly not my place to reveal what others disclosed behind closed doors over wine, let me expand upon a few things I shared that night.

First, I told them that when I used to work at Virginia Tech (2003-2009), I had both noticed and been a little self-conscious about the fact that I was the only faculty member in Women’s Studies who regularly wore make-up. My self-consciousness stemmed from multiple sources:

Comparing access to higher education in Brazil and India using Critical Race Theory

by Loni Bordoloi Pazich

Book chapter in As the World Turns: Implications of Global Shifts in Higher Education for Theory, Research and Practice (pub. 2012)

"Seeing Immanent Difference: Lorna Simpson and the Face's Affect"

by Laurie Rodrigues

Published in _Rhizomes_, Issue 23 (April 2012).
Special Issue on Deleuze and Photography. Guest Editor, Michael Kramp.

"SAMO as an Escape Clause": Jean-Michel Basquiat's Engagement with a Commodified American Africanism

by Laurie Rodrigues

_Journals of American Studies_, Cambridge University Press 2011

"Seeing Immanent Difference: Lorna Simpson and the Face's Affect"

by Laurie Rodrigues

Published in _Rhizomes_, Issue 23 (April 2012).
Special Issue on Deleuze and Photography. Guest Editor, Michael Kramp.

How does David Gillborn regard the significance of ‘race’ in education in Britain today?

by Thomas Sampson

The black students in schools all over Britain are victim on institutionalised racism everyday. In research carried... more The black students in schools all over Britain are victim on institutionalised racism everyday. In research carried out by Dr David Gillborn, an explanation for how this can be possible is offered using various methods. The paper argues that black youths are being segregated through academic achievement.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Journal Special Issue: Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

by Karen Soldatic

CALL FOR PAPERS:
Journal Special Issue: Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
more CALL FOR PAPERS:
Journal Special Issue: Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

Disability and Colonialism: (dis)encounters and anxious intersectionalities

Guest Editors: Shaun Grech (Manchester Metropolitan University) & Karen Soldatic (University of New South Wales)

We are pleased to announce that we will be guest editing a special edition entitled Disability and Colonialism: (dis)encounters and anxious intersectionalities on behalf of the established refereed journal Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

The aim of this special issue is to position disability within the colonial (the real and imagined), through which to explore a range of (often anxious) intersectionalities as disability is theorised, constructed, and lived as a post/neocolonial condition. While postcolonial theory and associated fields (e.g. critical theory, cultural studies etc.) have engaged with race, gender and ethnicity in the exploration of themes of identity, representation, space, historicity and the neocolonial, they have almost wholly bypassed disabled people- paradoxically limited to the subjectification of the able-bodied, or rather disembodying colonialism. Westerncentric fields of study such as disability studies often remain detached from the global South, the histories, contexts and cultures of these specific geopolitical spaces, and how disability is ontologically constructed and lived through a history replete with signifiers of power and empire and that frame the global. While some have adopted colonialism as a metaphor for the experience of disability (see for example Shakespeare, 2000), of colonized bodies by the medical profession, the colonial encounter per se, its creation of and implications for the disabled subject, remains inadequately theorised. In turn, disability is persistently removed from history and any contemplation of the post or neocolonial and efforts (discursive or material) at decolonizing these spaces and those within.

The special issue aims to transcend disciplinary, epistemological, methodological, spatial and historical boundaries. Engaging indigenous, post/neocolonial, disability studies, critical theory, psychology, Latin American Cultural Studies, and a range of other perspectives and literatures, and prioritising voices from the global South, we invite authors to engage in critical debate around colonialism to explore a range of thematic concerns (not exclusively):

• Colonial representations and the construction of the disabled body and mind
• The violence and disablism of colonialism
• Intersections of race, ethnicity, culture, gender and disability
• Empire and the domestication of bodies: globalisation, economics and beyond
• Disabled identities, metaphors and language, and their roles in subjugation
• From the colonial to the post/neocolonial: disability and contemporary lineages of imperialism
• Social identities and visions of disability
• Colonial medicalisation: identifying, labelling and ‘treating’ the disabled body
• The Christianising mission, biblical renditions and the disabled subject
• Decolonizing epistemologies, practices and lives: renegotiating power and contemplating global justice

We encourage authors to engage work on Southern theory and movements and approaches prioritising and promoting Southern epistemologies and counter-hegemonic knowledges emerging from struggles for justice.

Those wishing to submit an article, please email your full manuscript to both Shaun Grech (S.Grech@mmu.ac.uk) and Karen Soldatic (ajks123@bigpond.com). Please insert ‘Submission for Disability and Colonialism Special Issue’ in the subject line. Manuscripts will be sent anonymously for double peer review, and comments and recommendations relayed to authors through the editors.

Articles should not exceed 8,000 words in length, and include a 300 word abstract. The journal style guide is available here: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1369-801X&linktype=44.

Manuscripts should be submitted by no later than: 1st January 2013

Taking risks, taking responsibility: on whiteness and full citizenship under the South African Constitution

by Pierre Vos

This paper is a talk presented at the Gordon Institure Series on Great Texts on 19 April 2012 and deals with questions around whiteness and race in South Africa.

Review of film series 'Race, the Power of an Illusion'

by Christopher Phelps

Journal of American History (Dec. 2004):  1119-1121.

What Does Quality Mean in the Context of White Institutional Space?

by Danny Martin

"Racial Tokenism in the School Workplace: An Exploratory Study of Black Teachers in Overwhelmingly White Schools"

by Hilton Kelly

Du Boisian Double Consciousness in the Multicultural Classroom and the Questions it Raises

by Hilton Kelly

Barely legal: Racism and migrant farm labour in the context of Canadian multiculturalism

by J. Adam Perry

published in 'Citizenship Studies', 2012

This article investigates how colonial attitudes towards race operate alongside official multiculturalism in Canada to... more This article investigates how colonial attitudes towards race operate alongside official multiculturalism in Canada to justify the legally exceptional exclusion of migrant farm workers from Canada’s socio-political framework. The Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program is presented in this article as a relic of Canada’s racist and colonial past, one that continues uninterrupted in the present age of statist multiculturalism. The legal continuation and growth in the use of non-citizens to conduct labour distasteful to Canadian nationals has provided an effective means for the Canadian state to regulate the ongoing flow of non-preferred races on the margins while promoting a pluralist and ethnically diverse political image at home and abroad.

In the face of a labour shortage constructed as a political crisis of considerable urgency, the Canadian state has continued to admit non-immigrants into the country to perform labour deemed unattractive yet necessary for the well-being of Canadian citizens while simultaneously suspending the citizenship and individual rights of those same individual migrant workers. By legislating the restriction of rights and freedoms to a permanently revolving door of temporary non-citizens through the mechanism of a guest worker programme, the Canadian state is participating in the bio-political regulation of foreign nationals.

Race and Genealogy : Buffon and the Formation of the Concept of “Race

by Claude-Olivier Doron

Draft to be published in Humana.Mente, 22, Special Issue “Making sense of Gender, Sex, Race and the Family”, July 2012

This article analyses the conditions of formation of the concept of “race” in natural history in the middle of the... more This article analyses the conditions of formation of the concept of “race” in natural history in the middle of the XVIIIth century. Relying on the method of historical epistemology to avoid some of the aporia raised by the traditional historiography of “racism”, it focuses on the specifities of the concept of “race” in contrast to others (“variety”, “species”…) and tries to answer the following questions: to what extent the concept of “race” was integrated in natural history’s discourses before the middle of the XVIIIth century? To which kind of concepts and problems was it linked and to which style of reasoning did it pertain? To which conditions could it enter natural history and develop in it? The article answers that “race” pertained to a genealogical style of reasoning which was largely extraneous to natural history before the middle of the XVIIIth century. Natural history was rather dominated by another style of reasoning, logical and classificatory, which principles and concepts defined strong obstacles to the development of a concept of “race”. To understand how the concept of “race” developed in natural history, one has to understand how the genealogical style of reasoning entered natural history and modified the very principles of classification that organized it. I try to establish that it is through Buffon and some of the main authors of the “monogenist” tradition that the most fundamental conditions for the integration of a genealogical style of reasoning and the development of a concept of “race” are met. To put it clearly, in contrast to many scholars’ analysis and following some intuitions of P.R Sloan, I argue that Buffon in particular, and monogenism in general, were decisive in the integration and development of the concept of “race” in natural history.