Race Studies

Bensonhurst, Brooklyn: Italian American Victims and Victimizers

by Jerome Krase

This is a draft of an article published as “Bensonhurst, Brooklyn: Italian American Victimizers and Victims.” In The Review of Italian American Studies. 2000: 233-44.

A hapless attempt at swimming': Representations of Eric Moussambani

by John Nauright

published in Critical Arts 17:1/2 (2003), 106-122, co-authored with Tara Magdalinski

One of the most powerful images to emerge from the pool at the Sydney 2000 Olympics was that of Eric Moussambani from... more One of the most powerful images to emerge from the pool at the Sydney 2000 Olympics was that of Eric Moussambani from Equatorial Guinea who swam his heat of the 100-meter freestyle alone after the other two swimmers in his heat were disqualified. Moussambani completed the distance over one minute slower than eventual gold medallist Pieter van den Hoogenband. The media coverage of Moussambani's performance illustrates that the discourses of colonialism, paternalism, and racial stereotyping remain central in the modern Olympic movement. This paper analyses media reports of Moussambani and identifies three main frames used to contextualize his performance at the Olympics. We situate Moussambani's swim within a broader framework that reveals the mechanisms used to display African bodies for the European gaze as well as the paternalist Olympic discourse that seeks to universalize Western sporting practices within a global culture that privileges Western cultural and economic practices.

PHDabstract-résumésdethèse

by Claude-Olivier Doron

This document includes english and french abstracts of my PhD Thesis on 'Races and degeneration. The emergence on the... more This document includes english and french abstracts of my PhD Thesis on 'Races and degeneration. The emergence on the knowledge on the abnormals', a detailed description of the different chapters (in french) and of its main results (in french) and its table of contents.

Islamophobia and Hellenophilia: Greek Myths of Post-colonial Europe

by Rodanthi Tzanelli

Book chapter in S. Sayyid and A. Vakil, Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives, London: Hurst.

Race Psychology between “Guilty Science” and “Innocent Politics”

by Vlad Glaveanu

Europe's Journal of Psychology, August 2009

This article will discuss the intricate ways in which, throughout the history of Race Psychology, the “science of... more This article will discuss the intricate ways in which, throughout the history of Race Psychology, the “science of race” depended on and reinforced the “politics of race”. A brief presentation of the main moments in the history of Race Psychology will be followed by a closer look into the mechanisms through which politics underpins the discoveries of a “guilty” science and science, in its turn, has been used to justify the “innocent” politics of racism and discrimination. Finally, a critical outlook on the past and present of Race Psychology is proposed, one that would simultaneously consider the many facets of this discipline: scientific, political, institutional and ideological.

Keywords: Race psychology, science of race, politics of race, anti-racism

Take Me Out of the Ballgame: the Decline in Participation and Identification of African-Americans in Baseball

by Holly Prior

Written in partial-completion for requirements in the Barrett Honors College. My thesis committee is listed under "advisers" on my page.

Racializing Mental Illness: Understanding African-Caribbean Schizophrenia in the UK

by Clare Xanthos

published in 'Critical Social Work', 2008

All multiracial societies have to grapple with the benefits versus the costs of the integration of minorities into... more All multiracial societies have to grapple with the benefits versus the costs of the integration of minorities into majority communities. Indeed, in relation to the costs of integration, it could be argued that integration and assimilation increases non-White people’s exposure to racialized experiences and racism, which in turn predisposes them to mental illness. As such, it is worth considering the case of the UK, where Black integration and assimilation is particularly intense, and where the high rates of schizophrenia in the African-Caribbean population have been an area of concern for over three decades. This paper argues that the interplay between racial minority status stress, racism-induced stress, and racial bias in diagnosis may be significant factors influencing the high Black incidence rate of schizophrenia in the UK.

“Black Orientalism and Black Gods of the Metropolis,” in Edward E. Curtis IV and Danielle Brune Sigler, editors, The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, June 2009), 116-142.

by Jacob Dorman

This will be part of a second book.

This chapter identifies a substratum of self-titled "professors of Oriental and African mystic science" who... more This chapter identifies a substratum of self-titled "professors of Oriental and African mystic science" who collaborated with each other and created new identities in the context of the marketplace, the Marcus Garvey movement, Orientalism, and influences as diverse as occultism, Spiritualism, Pentecostalism, Freemasonry, Anglo-Israelism, Judaism, and
Islam. The specter of African Americans adopting and using Orientalism puts a different twist on the concept.  The discourse of civilization was rarely simply rejected or resisted outright; rather it was recycled and reformulated. For at least some African Americans, adopting Orientalist identities could express anti-imperialist political sympathies, expand personal freedom, and even allow criticism of the West's conceit to be more civilized and technologically superior to the rest of the world.

Black Orientalists triangulated between dark and light by reaching outside of America, in an attempt to overcome American racism and criticize the dominant discourse of civilization.  The work shows that Harlem's networks of religious practitioners used religious, magical, and ideological systems to help create Black Israelism, Rastafarianism, Father Divine's movement, and some early forms of Black Islam. Orientalism is a construct that can help us to reconceptualize and reconnect many of the "Black Gods of the Metropolis."  Read in the larger contexts of the Harlem Renaissance and the migration of rural
peoples into the quickened pace of Northern cities, this approach suggests that there was a rich substratum of working class cultural creativity that deserves to be read into the history of the literary and artistic Harlem Renaissance.  It challenges us to think of working class African Americans not merely as workers or migrants, but as organic intellectuals capable of voicing their own dreams, mysticism and religions that were articulate responses to the key concerns of the age.

The Invention of Race in the European MIddle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages

by Geraldine Heng

LITERATURE COMPASS 8.5 (MAY 2011): 258-274.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lico.2011.8.issue-5/issuetoc

“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely-held belief in critical... more “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely-held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era.

Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features—the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race.

One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion—so much in play again today—enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time.

Part I—“Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages”—surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide.

Part II—“Locations of Medieval Race”—identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I.

The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages II: Locations of Medieval Race

by Geraldine Heng

LITERATURE COMPASS 8.5 (MAY 2011): 275-293.

“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely-held belief in critical... more “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely-held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era.

Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon law, statuary, illustrations, religious commentary, and architectural features—the study considers racial thinking, racial law, racial formation, and racialized behaviors and phenomena in medieval Europe before the emergence of a recognizable vocabulary of race.

One focus is how a political hermeneutics of religion—so much in play again today—enabled the positing of fundamental human differences in biopolitical and culturalist ways to create strategic essentialisms demarcating human kinds and populations. Another focus is how race figures in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe (beginning as Latin Christendom) in this time.

Part I—“Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages”—surveys the current state of race theory, and puts in conversation race studies and medieval studies, fields that exist on either side of a vast divide.

Part II—“Locations of Medieval Race”—identifies and analyzes specific concretions of medieval race, while continuing to develop the theoretical arguments of Part I.

Black No More?

by Hettie Williams

This paper is an examination of the "new" racial genetics and African Americans. This paper is an examination of the "new" racial genetics and African Americans.

In Pursuit of Self: The Identity of An American President and Cosmopolitanism

by Hettie Williams

This paper is an examination of race, identity, and Barack Obama. The phrases hybrid fixity and other black... more This paper is an examination of race, identity, and Barack Obama. The phrases hybrid fixity and other black cosmopolitan are deployed to discuss the identity of America's first self-identified African American president.

Chester Himes, Boris Vian, and the Transatlantic Politics of Racial Representation

by Grégory Pierrot

African American Review, 43.2-3 (Spring/Fall 2009): 247-262.

" Our Hero": Toussaint Louverture In British Representations

by Grégory Pierrot

In the bibliography of The Black Jacobins, the groundbreaking historiography of the Haitian Revolution first published... more In the bibliography of The Black Jacobins, the groundbreaking historiography of the Haitian Revolution first published in 1938, C. L. R. James mentions that "during the Napoleonic war, Marcus Rainsford and James Stephen wrote panegyrics of Toussaint in English. These books are little more than propaganda pamphlets." James's scathing assessment of Stephen's 1803 Buonaparte in the West Indies; or the History of Toussaint Louverture, the African Hero3 and Rainsford's 1805 Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti is not wide of the mark, and it is echoed by Geggus's comments some fifty years later. Stephen at least recognized that the ulterior motive in writing his book was to sway British opinion against Napoleon at a time when the French leader had found short-lived popularity across the English Channel. Yet, the very fact that these publications seem to James so clearly partisan is what makes them especially interesting. These books, among other literary and pictorial treatments of the Haitian Revolution, participated actively in the deliberate obfuscation of Haitian history that C. L. R. James eventually did so much to reverse. Ironically, this obfuscation was organized around the appropriation of Toussaint Louverture by British culture. Studying Toussaint's representations in British contexts is crucial to uncover the role Haitian general Toussaint played in this process. In caricatures, newspaper articles, and books of the time, Toussaint was systematically presented as a British figure, in spirit if not in fact. Simultaneously, in making Toussaint into a lone hero separated from his political actions and background, journalists and writers were working on the erasure of the Haitian Revolution from British history. In the last years of his life, but even more so immediately after his death, Toussaint Louverture was turned into a British literary character to neutralize his political legacy and dissolve it into British culture and hegemony.

We Do Not Have Immigrant Children at This School, We Just Have Children Adopted From Abroad

by Diana Marre

Published in D. Marre & L. Briggs eds. 2009. International Adoption: Global Inequalities and the Circulation of Children.  New York: New York University Press. ISBN 13/10: 978-0-8147-9102-8 / 0-8147-9102-6 (paper), ISBN 13/10: 978-0-8147-9101-1 / 0-8147-9101-8 (cloth). http://www.nyupress.org/books/International_Adoption-products_id-11047.html