In the first part of this essay, I develop the argument that Michel Foucault's work should be read with geographical and topological ideas in mind. I argue that Foucault's archeology and genealogy are fundamentally determined by spatial, topological, geographical, and geometrical metaphors and concepts. This spatial dimension of genealogy is explicitly related to racism and the regimes that domesticate agents through the practices, institutions and ideologies of racialization. The second part offers a genealogical reading of US history and spatiality in (...) terms of its racial institutions. I suggest that if we want to read the US geographies of topographies and cartographies of racism in a Foucauldian manner, then we must focus on plantations, ghettos, and prisons as the spaces‐institutions‐geographies that consolidated the racial matrix of US polity. My goal is to acculturate Foucauldian racial genealogy to the US racial matrix, and, conversely, to read US geo‐history in terms of racializing spatialities. (shrink)

This article explores human genetic diversity research east of what was the iron curtain. It follows the technique of “genogeographic mapping” back to its early Soviet origins and up to the post-Soviet era. Bringing together the history of genogeographic mapping and genealogies of “nationality” and “race” in the USSR, I discuss how populations and belonging were enacted in late Soviet biological anthropology and human genetics. While genogeography had originally been developed within the early Soviet livestock economy, anthropologists, public health scientists, (...) and medical geneticists reanimated the technique in the late 1960s after the end of the Lysenko era and its ban on classical genetics. In the 1970s, population geneticists pursued a project to compile all genetic data on the USSR population, resulting in a “genogeographic atlas,” consisting of series of tables as well as maps projecting genetic markers onto geographic grids. Following the post-Soviet trajectories of these maps, I examine the ways in which human genetic diversity studies realign with renegotiations of difference in today’s Russian Federation. The exploration of the Soviet case of human genetic diversity research contributes to our understanding of the varied ways in which racializing discourses were entangled in the project of modernization. (shrink)

It might seem that racial profiling by doctors raised few of the same concerns as racial profiling by police, immigration, or airport security. This paper argues that the similarities are greater than first appear. The inappropriate use of racial generalizations by doctors may be as harmful and insulting as their use by law enforcement officials. Indeed, the former may be more problematic in compromising an ideal of individualized treatment that is more applicable to doctors than to police. (...) Yet doctors, unlike police, should not attempt to ignore race altogether. Race and ethnicity are associated with the geography of disease, with social and cultural factors relevant to disease, and, to some extent, with genetic predispositions to disease. Moreover, greater attention to the distinctive health conditions of certain racial and ethnic groups is necessary to make up for past neglect. But it will be a tricky business to steer a middle course between a naïve, reckless, or dogmatic color blindness and a stereotype-driven overreliance on race and ethnicity. In trying to steer such a course, the doctor can only hope for the day when a combination of more individualized genomic medicine and greater social equality will make it possible for her to pay less attention to race and ethnicity without detriment to her patients' health. (shrink)

Most research about race has been influenced by values of one sort or another. This started with the inception of race as a biological category. Cognitive values about race were concerned with the worth of distinctive taxonomic divisions, and political values about it were concerned with the moral, aesthetic, and political meanings of these human distinctions. The presence of cognitive and non‐cognitive values in contemporary social science concerning race is no less present or important. The role of racial politics (...) is exposed in the debate over the nature of contemporary residential housing patterns, as well as in examinations of the methods and measures of segregation research. Such examinations uncover not only a sociology of the segregation studies, but also certain values about race and segregation. This leads us to richer explanations, given our public political desires, than we would have without those values. (shrink)

MARINA PAOLA BANCHETTI-ROBINO is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Florida Atlantic University. Her areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and zoosemiotics. Her publications have appeared in such journals as Synthese, Husserl Studies, Idealistic Studies, Philosophy East and West, and The Review of Metaphysics. She has also contributed essays to The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy (1997), Feminist Phenomenology (2000), and Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology on the Perennial (...) Issue of Microcosm and Macrocosm (2006). She co-edited Philosophies of the Environment and Technology (1999) and is currently working on a book-length project entitled The Birth of Science Out of the Spirit of Myth: A Historico-Phenomenological Re-Examination of the Crisis of the European Sciences. BERNARD BOXILL was born in Saint Lucia, West Indies where he received his primary and secondary education. He studied philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, Canada and at the University of California, Los Angeles where he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy in 1971. He has published numerous articles, a book, Blacks and Social Justice (1992), and is professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ED BRANDON was born and educated in England, studying philosophy and linguistics at The University of York, England, and later philosophy at The University of Oxford with the late John Mackie. After teaching in Sierra Leone and briefly in England, he went to teach philosophy of education at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica in 1978. From 1992 he has been attached to a policy unit of the Vice-Chancellery, based at the Cave Hill campus in Barbados, where he has been assisting since 2000 with a new major in philosophy. His academic work can be accessed from http://cavehill.uwi.edu/bnccde/epb/personalpage.html CAROLYN CUSICK is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is a founding member of the Phenomenology Roundtable. Her research focuses on feminist epistemology, Africana philosophy, and phenomenology. LEWIS GORDON is President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is Laura H. Carnell Professor, the most distinguished chair, at Temple University, where he holds appointments in philosophy, religion, and Judaic studies and directs the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies. He is also Ongoing Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning Her Majesty's Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Paradigm, 2006), An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwell, 2006) and Not Only the Master's Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (Paradigm, 2005). CLEVIS HEADLEY is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, director of the Ethnic Studies Certificate Program, as well as director of the Master's in Liberal Studies. Professionally, he serves as the Vice-President and Treasurer of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Professor Headley has published widely in the areas of Critical Race Theory and Africana philosophy. He has also published in Analytic philosophy, focusing specifically on Gottlob Frege. PAGET HENRY is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua, and the co-editor of C. L. R. James' Caribbean. Professor Henry also serves as the editor of the C. L. R. James Journal, and has published numerous articles on the political economy of the Caribbean as well as on African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean philosophy. ESIABA IROBI is Associate Professor of International Theatre/Performance Studies at Ohio University, Athens. His groundbreaking book: A Theatre for Cannibals: Resisting Globalization on the Continent and Diaspora since 1441 will be published by Palgrave Macmillan, London, in 2007. He has been invited to be an External Resident Fellow at the prestigious Dartmouth College Humanities Institute for the 2007-2008 academic year. CHIKE JEFFERS is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program of the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University. His interests are in Africana philosophy, social and political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion and aesthetics. He is originally from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. CATHERINE JOHN is Associate Professor of African Diaspora Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her book Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing was co-published by Duke University Press and UWI Press in 2003. She has published several articles on Caribbean literature and culture and her current book project is entitled The Just Society and the Diasporic Imagination. She spends her summer working in Woodside, St. Mary, Jamaica helping with a summer school for children and participating in the community's emancipation celebration. KENNETH KNIES is a doctoral student in philosophy at Stony Brook University. His areas of focus are phenomenology and ancient philosophy. He is also a contributing editor for Political Affairs magazine. EDIZON LEN is a photographer and coordinator of the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. In 2006, he was curator of the photo exhibit "The Color of the Diaspora" presented at the Cultural Center of the Catholic University of Ecuador and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He is currently completing his doctorate at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar with a focus on Maroon thought. REKHA MENON is Associate Professor of Art History at State University of New York, Buffalo State. She is the author of Seductive Aesthetics of Post Colonialism (forthcoming). Her area of research focuses on current philosophical investigations in colonial and neocolonial aspects of Indian art, artistic/cultural practices and philosophies and their relationship to Western arts and philosophies. Her manuscripts under review are: Ashamed of Our Nakedness, Is There Ever a Naked Body? Ambivalence in Contemporary Indian Expressive Aesthetics and Insatiable Desire. MICHAEL R. MICHAU is a Ph.D. candidate in the Philosophy and Literature Program at Purdue University, and during the 2006-2007 school year, a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Studies and Department of Philosophy at Ohio State University. He is the co-founder and co-secretary of the North American Levinas Society. CHARLES W. MILLS is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He works in the general area of oppositional political theory, and is the author of numerous articles and three books: The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University Press, 1998), and From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). MABOGO P. MORE is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He has published articles on African philosophy and social and political philosophy in a number of academic journals, such as South African Journal of Philosophy, Dialogue and Universalism, Alternation, Theoria, and African Journal of Political Science. MARILYN NISSIM-SABAT, Ph.D., M.S.W. is Professor Emerita and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Lewis University. Dr. Nissim-Sabat is also a psychotherapist in private practice. She is the author of numerous book chapters and papers in the fields of philosophy (Husserlian phenomenology), psychoanalysis, feminism, and critical race theory. Citations of her works can be found on her website: marilynnissim-sabat.com. FREDERICK OCHIENG'-ODHIAMBO is a Senior Lecturer of Philosophy and Coordinator of the discipline at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. His major research areas are African philosophy and social philosophy. He has published several articles on philosophic sagacity. IVAN PETRELLA is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. He is author of The Future of Liberation Theology: An Argument and Manifesto (SCM Press, 2006) and editor of Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation (Orbis Books, 2005) as well as co-editor of the series Reclaiming Liberation Theology (SCM Press) RICHARD PITHOUSE is a research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. He is editor of Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Africa World Press, 2006). SATHYA RAO is Assistant Professor in French translation at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. His research fields include: theory of translation, continental philosophy, postcolonial studies, discourses on Africa, and Francophone cinema and literature. He has published articles in various peer-reviewed journals and written chapters in several collective books such as: De l'Ecrit Africain a l'Oral le Phenomene Graphique Africain, Simon Battestini (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006) and Thèorie-rèbellion. Un Ultimatum, Gilles Grelet (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2005). He has a co-edited a book on Francophone African cinema L'Afrique fait son cinema (Montreal: Memoires d'encrier, forthcoming). Sathya Rao is vice-president of the International Non-Philosophical Organisation (INPhO), member of the Canadian Association of Translatology (CATS), coordinator of the research team Poexil, and Secretary of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is co-founder of an online journal Alternative Francophone. CATHERINE WALSH is Professor and Director of the doctoral program in Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. Her research interests include the geopolitics of knowledge, interculturality and concerns related to the Afro-Andean Diaspora and the production of decolonial thought. Among her recent publications are Pensamiento crìtico y matriz colonial (Quito: Abya Yala, 2005), "Interculturality and the Coloniality of Power. An 'Other' Thinking and Positioning from the Colonial Difference," in Coloniality of Power, Transmodernity, and Border Thinking, R. Grosfoguel, J.D. Saldivar, and N. Maldonado-Torres (Eds.) (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming) and "Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge: Decolonial Thought and Cultural Studies 'Others' in the Andes," Cultural Studies (forthcoming). KRISTIN WATERS has published widely in the areas of race and gender. Her anthology Enlightened Conversations: Women and Men Political Theorists (Blackwell, 2000) challenges political theorists to be more inclusive of race and gender in their research and teaching. Her book Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, co-edited with Carol Conaway (University of Vermont Press, forthcoming), addresses the varied intellectual traditions of black women's thought that spans more than two hundred years in North America. She is currently Professor of Philosophy at Worcester State College and Visiting Research Associate at Brandeis University. (shrink)

Systems of oppression function by exploiting the most vulnerable amongst us. Where these oppressive systems overlap, the victims are pitted against one another. Slaughterhouses provide a particularly brutal example, wherein speciesism, capitalism, and carcerality intersect at the expense of their collective victims. In a dozen compelling essays from around the world, Vegan Entanglements: Dismantling Racial and Carceral Capitalism examines the ways human and animal bodies are controlled, manipulated, and sectioned within a system that commodifies labor, production, and individual beings (...) for profit. The book is divided into four sections: 1: The Intersection(s) Between Prison- and Animal-Industrial Complexes; 2: Critical Animal Geographies and the Panopticon; 3: Law, Veganism, and the Carceral State; and 4: Fighting for Our Collective Liberation with Consistent Anti-Oppression. (shrink)

ArgumentIn August of 1977, Australian pathologist David W. Buntine delivered a presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australia in Melbourne, Victoria. In this presentation, he used the diagnostic category of “Eskimoma,” to describe a unique set of salivary gland tumors he had observed over the past five years within Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Center. Only found amongst Inuit patients, these tumors were said to have unique histological, clinical, and epidemiological features and were unlike any other (...) disease category that had ever been encountered before. To understand where this nosological category came from, and its long-term impact, this paper traces the historical trajectory of the “Eskimoma.” In addition to discussing the methods and infrastructures that were essential to making the idea of Inuit cancer “visible,” to the pathologist, the epidemiologist, and to society at large, this paper discusses how Inuit tissue samples obtained, stored, and analyzed in Winnipeg, Manitoba, came to be codified into a new, racially based disease category – one that has guided Canadian and international understandings of circumpolar cancer trends and shaped northern healthcare service delivery for the past sixty years. (shrink)

This paper asks whether and how caste fits into a global history of racial capitalism. The mischaracterisation of caste as custom has long misled analysts and thwarted solidarities. Drawing on the insights of two important bodies of literature, this paper seeks to remedy that misdiagnosis and show that (1) caste abolition must be central to any effective anti-capitalist politics in South Asia, and (2) a focus on ‘local’ systems of racialisation like caste is necessary in any history of global (...) racial capitalism. The two bodies of literature I engage with to achieve these aims are: scholarship on racial capitalism and scholarship on the Indian transition to capitalism. The result is an expanding of the geography of racial capitalism and the centring of caste-based unfreedoms as central to the history of capitalism in the Indian subcontinent. (shrink)

This article aims to listen, read and move with the South African musician Abdullah Ibrahim by focusing on various works in his corpus that see him weave together a sonic aesthetic and identify sound, space and time as fundamentally intertwined with and constituted by the experiences of racial violence and anti-blackness in a modern colonial world. Part of our critical pursuit is to highlight Abdullah Ibrahim as a theorist of black geography invested in the everyday sounds ringing through (...) the ghettoes, townships and reserves created as debased and inexhaustible reservoirs for cheap labour by colonial-apartheid regimes. We will also examine how some of Abdullah Ibrahim's music interrogates the status of the black subject through the modalities of a black Islamic sonic aesthetic. This is one of the factors which qualifies it as a layered site of mythical and experimental histories and enables us to identify his body of work as deeply connected with the articulations of loss, suffering, the cadence of change, and hope. (shrink)

New York City has a long history of gentrification, well demonstrated by the strategies of “revitalization” and “re-development” that have occurred in Harlem throughout the last century. Less well known is the historical, political, and social context surrounding New York’s Pier 45, also known as the Christopher Street Pier. As a historically-known gathering spot for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals, the Christopher Street Pier gained recognition for harbouring what could be described as a queer public . However, recent processes (...) of gentrification have changed Pier 45 into the Hudson River Park, ostensibly privatizing the site. With reference to Braidotti’s nomadic subject, this paper explores the Christopher Street Pier as a representation of queer geographies. Further, it argues that the re-appropriation of the once queer public space of Pier 45 exposes a municipal agenda of surveillance in relation to sexualized and racialized identities. Through reference to the activist practices of FIERCE, a local NGO, I show how the nomadic subjectivities of queer youth open up a discussion of ethical responsibility and point toward strategic movements of resistance in the face of gentrification in New York’s West Village. (shrink)

Renowned for his geological studies, Jean-Baptiste d'Omalius d'Halloy also pursued a far less known anthropological career. In different ‘editions’ of his main work, the first Belgian armchair anthropologist tried to divide the world population into races, branches, families and peoples. As a true figure of transition between the 18th and 19th century, he used both human and natural sciences to establish his racial classification, based on natural characters and geography, but also evolution, history and language. Influenced by both (...) William Frederic Edwards and Paul Broca, d'Omalius often defended polygenist views, despite his catholic and monogenist conviction and his refusal to accept the multiple origin of humankind. It is also notable that d'Omalius, like Tacitus and Montesquieu before him, claimed that the sole origin of humankind could to be situated in Northern European, which for d'Omalius still represented the homeland of the most civilized races. Critical of the ‘Aryan myth’, he stated that ‘Germanic’ culture and language had spread over Asia and not the other way around, an argument that caused conflict within learned societies and at international conferences. For the first time, based on new archival material, this article offers an overview of Belgian anthropology before the creation of Société d'Anthropologie de Bruxelles in 1882. (shrink)

This article explores chemical skin bleaching practices in urban Ghana to demonstrate the ways that particular racialized understandings of meaning are deployed in a contemporary postcolonial African society. I argue that the processes of racialization indexed by skin bleaching in Ghana must be contextualized within global racial formations; specifically, they can only be understood by examining the interlinked local and global ideologies and practices of race. In elaborating this argument, the essay also engages with contemporary African diaspora theorization that (...) tends to foreground diasporic identity and experience at the expense of contemporary continental processes. By bringing a postcolonial African society into a dialogue about race, processes of racialization, and the interlinked transnational construction of black identities, this essay offers one way out of the ambivalent relationship that I believe diaspora theorization has with Africa. (shrink)

The work of the French Lithuanian Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, describes a perceptive rethinking of the possibility of concrete acts of goodness in the world, a rethinking never more necessary than now, in the wake of the cruel realities of the twentieth century—ten million dead in the First World War, forty million dead in the Second World War, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Soviet gulags, the grand slaughter of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” the pointless and gory Vietnam War, the Cambodian self-genocide and (...) many an attempted extermination from the face of the earth of entire nations of indigenous peoples. The list of horrors goes on and on—daily holocausts that do not distinguish between the civilian and the soldier, the guilty and the innocent, those deserving of life and those less deserving. (shrink)

This book approaches the problems and circumstances confronting blacks in the context of black values, the black community, and the role of government. ^BContents:: The Black Community's Values as a Basis for Action; The Community as Agent of Change; and The Government's Role in Meeting New Challenges.

Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, Sodom and Gomorrah represent locales in which threats to national formation are couched in sexual terms. The biblical narrative insists on a particular social invisibility for those sexual activities not blessed by the bonds of matrimony. Reclaiming Sodom surveys a number of institutions that have had an interest in perpetuating these views: the police, the state, the church and the law. The collection ranges through biblical scholarship, an investigation of the Founding Fathers' beliefs, the legal mobilization (...) towards the category of sodomy in 18th and 19th century England, and the US Supreme Court's 1986 Bowers vs. Hardwick decision. Analysis is provided of the ways in which the Judeo-Christian tradition has shaped anthropological accounts of the same-sex practices of non-Western people, as well as essays on how colonial gestures have marked lesbian identity in the Carribean, and derformed narratives about the racial geography of AIDS. Reclaiming Sodom explores alternatives to the force of the Sodomitic biblical narrative in Islamic, non-western, and western traditions, and discusses the ways in which sodomy calls into question normative definitions of sexuality and gender. The collection pursues the "pleasures and dangers" of these alternatives, and takes on Proust's refusal to imagine a social movement founded on the "stigma" of Sodom. The collection examines the relations between sex/gender identities and sexual acts in important and provocative ways, and argues for the political use and usefulness of both Sodom and sodomy. Reclaiming Sodom makes an important and controversial contribution to the literature on sexuality and gender, as well as the nature of sex in our culture. Contributors: Dorothy Allison, Robert Alter, Neil Bartlett, Leo Bersani, Gerald Creed, Marc Daniel, Lee Edelman, Janet E. Halley, Jonathan Ned Katz, Pierre Klossowski, Rocky O'Donovan, Guy Hocquenghem, Cindy Patton, Marquis de Sade, David Shannon, Makeda Silver, Jonathan Goldberg. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust AmericaKeith P. Feldman (bio)Eric J. Sundquist. Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005. 662 pp.Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America provides a wide-ranging, rich, and nuanced cultural history of what Eric J. Sundquist terms the "black-Jewish question" (2). In doing so, the book serves as both culmination and corrective to an already-expansive scholarly (...) literature on blacks and Jews generated since the late 1960s. Much of this scholarship has operated within a U.S.-centered paradigm to chart interethnic relations, laboring as it does to unpack, complicate, theorize, and otherwise come to understand the changing texture of black-Jewish relations and, in Sundquist's wods, its "intermixture of empathy, anxiety, and Hostility' (3)." Strangers in the Land stretches this paradigm to its limit, even as the diasporic imaginaries treated therein persistently escape a U.S. national imaginary and signal other possibilities for conceptualizing this tense and tender history.In its five hundred–plus pages of text, one hundred–plus pages of endnotes, and countless detailed footnotes (that are themselves illustrative and evocative), Sundquist has assembled a voluminous archive of textual material to show how works of the imagination by blacks and Jews have been "produced in a dynamic, multilayered historical matrix" that reveals the paradoxes of American liberalism (9). From the well-known and well-trodden (novels by Bellow, Roth, Malamud, and Morrison all play key roles) to the newly discovered and underappreciated (John A. Williams's Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light; Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, the Timeless People; Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Café; William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer; Jon Michael Spencer's Tribes of Benjamin; Lore Segal's Her First American), Sundquist's careful historicism reveals how works of the imagination can serve as both microscopic and telescopic lenses through which to examine the vicissitudes of what he calls black and Jewish "interdependent self-conceptions" in the United States (5).Along with addressing a thick textual archive with subtlety and patience, Sundquist's major analytical innovation is that, unlike many of his predecessors, which frequently [End Page 63] positioned their analyses within the scarred domestic terrain of post–civil rights polarization, Sundquist's voracious curiosity dwells in the archive's heterogeneous details, allowing him to linger in examples that routinely exceed the simple polarization of blacks and Jews. The complex racial geography of New York boroughs and greater Chicagoland, for instance, is overlaid by Auschwitz and Egypt and Jerusalem, Ghana and Kenya and the Caribbean. In these settings, Sundquist spends time with figures only glimpsed in passing in other works: Arab Jews, Afro-Zionists, and anti-Zionists; Jews and Black Jews; Black Panthers, Israeli Black Panthers, Holocaust survivors, Holocaust deniers, Black Power advocates, and their Jewish Power doppelgangers. In a lengthy meditation on Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Sundquist charts the novel's refractions of the problem of American racial equality in the wake of the Holocaust. Similarly, the careful readings of novels by Naylor, Williams, Spencer, and Kelley exemplify the rich results of Sundquist's method.This deeply historicist and intertextual project echoes Sundquist's 1993 epic work To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, which strenuously and quite effectively demonstrated how African American literature is constitutive of American literature, and not merely a minor subset of it. If this earlier work revealed the continued paradox of racial slavery in American conceptions of democracy, Strangers in the Land serves as something of a sequel. The book places another massive racial project, the systematic genocide of Europe's Jews, at the heart of twentieth-century American life. "The Holocaust," writes Sundquist, "became the benchmark against which at least one other case, African American slavery and its aftermath, has been judged" (6). By placing Jewish genocide at the center of his analysis, Sundquist importantly reminds us of the conclusion reached almost simultaneously by both Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire, that the Nazi racial project had its ideological origins in nineteenth-century European imperialism, and that this legacy bears indelibly on the present... (shrink)

I am broadly sympathetic to Dale Matthew’s analysis concerning phenotypic devaluation and disadvantage. However, in what follows, I restrict my remarks to a few areas where I think he either lacks empirical precision, or overstates his case.

The handbook is a partial survey of multiple areas of food ethics: conventional agriculture and alternatives to it; animals; consumption ethics; food justice; food workers; food politics and policy; gender, body image, and healthy eating; and, food, culture and identity. -/- Food ethics, as an academic pursuit, is vast, incorporating work from philosophy as well as anthropology, economics, environmental sciences and other natural sciences, geography, law, and sociology. This Handbook provides a sample of recent philosophical work in food ethics. (...) This philosophical work addresses ethical issues with agricultural production, the structure of the global food system, the ethics of personal food consumption, the ethics of food policy, and cultural understandings of food and eating, among other issues. The work in this Handbook draws on multiple literatures within philosophy, including practical ethics, normative ethics, and political philosophy, as well as drawing on non-philosophical work. Part I considers ethical issues concerning the industrial model of farming that dominates in developed countries, looking most closely at industrial crop farming and its environmental effects. Part II concerns the ethics of animal agriculture. Part III concerns the ethics of consumption: is it morally permissible to consume various products? Part IV concerns justice—including racial, social, and economic justice—in the food system. Part V discusses some ethical and legal issues with specific kinds of food policies, including healthy eating policies, food labeling, and agricultural guest worker programs. Part VI includes four essays taking a critical eye to our public discourse about, and personal experiences of, dieting, healthy eating, and obesity prevention. Lastly, the essays in Part VII concern the personal, social, and moral significance of food. (shrink)

Kant scholars have paid relatively little attention to his raciology. They assume that his racism, as personal prejudice, can be disentangled from his core philosophy. They also assume that racism contradicts his moral theory. In this book, philosopher Huaping Lu-Adler challenges both assumptions. She shows how Kant's raciology--divided into racialism and racism--is integral to his philosophical system. She also rejects the individualistic approach to Kant and racism. Instead, she uses the notion of racism as ideological formation to demonstrate how Kant, (...) from his social location both as a prominent scholar and as a lifelong educator, participated in the formation of modern racist ideology. As a scholar, Kant developed a ground-breaking scientific theory of race from the standpoint of a philosophical investigator of nature or Naturforscher. As an educator, he transmitted denigrating depictions of the racialized others and imbued those descriptions with normative relevance. In both roles, he left behind, as one of his legacies, a worldview that excluded non-whites from such goods as recognitional respect and candidacy for cultural and moral achievements. Scholars who research and teach Kant's philosophy therefore have an unshakable burden to take part in the ongoing antiracist struggles, through their teaching practices as well as their scholarship. And they must do so with a pragmatic attention to nonideal social realities and a deliberate orientation toward substantial racial justice, equality, and inclusion. Lu-Adler pushes the discourse about Kant and racism well beyond the old debates about whether he was racist or whether his racism contaminates his philosophy. By foregrounding the lasting legacies of Kant's raciology, her work calls for a profound reorientation of Kant scholarship. (shrink)

It has become commonplace within feminist theory to claim that women’s lives are constructed by multiple, intersecting systems of oppression. In this thesis, I challenge the consensus that oppression is aptly captured by the theoretical model of “intersectionality.” While intersectionality originates in Black feminist thought as a purposive intervention into US antidiscrimination law, it has been detached from that context and harnessed to different representational aims. For instance, it is often asserted that intersectionality enables a representational politics that overcomes legacies (...) of exclusion within hegemonic Anglo-American feminism. I argue that intersectionality reinscribes the political exclusion of racialized women as a feature of their embodied identities. That is, it locates the failure of political representation in the “complex” identities of “intersectional” subjects, who are constructed as unrepresentable in terms of “race” or “gender” alone. Further, I argue that intersectionality fails to supplant race- and class-privileged women as the normative subjects of feminist theory and politics. In Chapter One, I demonstrate that intersectionality illicitly imports unitary concepts of “race,” “gender,” and “class.” In Chapter Two, I argue that intersectionality lacks a theory of hierarchy: it is a “flat geography” which cannot capture vertical and horizontal lines of power. In Chapter Three, I explore the role of analogical reasoning in rendering racialized women invisible both as gendered and as racialized subjects in twentieth-century social movements. To concretize this argument, I turn to Simone de Beauvoir’s use of race-sex analogies to describe (white, bourgeois) “women’s” situation in The Second Sex. In Chapter Four, I advance a programmatic unified account of oppression. I suggest that the possibility of a unified theory (as opposed to an intersectional one) is intimated in the concrete articulation of race, class, and gender. My point of departure is a phenomenology of capitalism, which reveals that these are all fundamentally modes of exploitation and appropriation. In Chapter Five, I theorize how they are made visible (and invisible) on the body. I extend Frantz Fanon’s account of “epidermalization,” drawing upon the marxian concepts of “fetishism” and “mode of appearance” to elaborate four structures of gendered racialized perception: first, the “miscegenation taboo” structures perceptions of the “purity” of whiteness and the “polluting” effects of blackness. Whiteness, theorised as a “possessive investment” and as “property” is defined by the right to exclude. Second, the “episteme of tellable differences” produces the conviction that we can automatically “tell the difference” between a body placed in one “racial” or gender category, and another—while bodies that temporarily confound classification cause fear and consternation. Third, the “race/reproduction bind” names the axiomatic assumption that “race” is reproduced through (heterosexual) procreation and that “race” is, therefore, biologically inheritable. Finally, the “fear/criminalisation reflex” refers to the bidirectional equation of particular racialised-gendered bodies with crime, and of crime with those bodies; this a function of the discursive use of ‘crime’ as an alibi for “race’” the systemic racialisation of punitive carceral institutions, and the historical origins of “race” in transatlantic chattel slavery, which shaped perceptual-cognitive associations of freedom with whiteness and captivity with blackness. (shrink)

My point of departure is Said’s rejection of the idea of an “Orientalist” Hellenism. What might it mean to argue that Orientalism characterizes “intra-European” cultural politics, specifically the colonial geography of western Europe vis-à-vis its “subaltern” Others? Contra Said, I argue that the function of Hellenism in constituting both the fantasy of Europe and western hegemony has an Orientalist structure. I explore the cultural underpinnings of Greece’s relation to “Europe” in Hellenistic discourses. Then, I suggest that the dominant discourse (...) surrounding the odious Greek debt has an Orientalist structure. Pairing a critique of Orientalism with a core-periphery analysis arguably enables a more nuanced understanding of the coloniality of power in today’s “age of austerity,” enabling a deconstruction of the racial logic underlying continental integration and revealing the violence inherent in the fantasy of European civilization. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface The essays in this special issue on Indigenous Feminisms in Settler Contexts engage feminist politics from multiple Indigenous geographies, histories, and standpoints. What emerges is a panoramic view of Indigenous feminist scholarship’s conceptual, linguistic, and artistic activism at this moment in time. We learn of praxis aimed at reclaiming Indigenous languages and ecological perspectives and the varied modes of resistance, survivance, and persistence. We also unpack the complex (...) racial/gender politics of colonial encounters in contexts where white women cared intimately for Indigenous children, or where they helped to recover Indigenous oral traditions, and we note how modes of help can also reproduce imperial power relations. Some essays, art works, and poems extend the geographic ambit of critiques of settler colonialism beyond American contexts: they deploy feminist rubrics to critique the continuing violent settlement of Palestine and Kashmir to demonstrate that the occupation of “marginal” places is constitutive of state-​ society relations; others describe how Australian Aboriginal and Sámi artists engage the question of Indigenous visibility. In different ways, they each show how staying in place, against all odds, can be radical. Our first two articles examine the politics of praxis. Michelle M. Jacob, Virginia R. Beavert, Regan Anderson, Leilani Sabzalian, and Joana Jansen analyze Indigenous feminist praxis surrounding Ichishkíin Indigenous language education. The “artivism” of Sámi artists Maxida 284Preface and Timimie Märak, which expresses concern for land and water rights, gender and sexuality, and Indigenous rights in Northern Europe takes center stage in Kyle Bladow’s essay. The next three articles interrogate historical records shaping Indigenous lives in northern Canada, southwest Pacific, and southwestern United States and Mexico. Val Marie Johnson examines how white women staff members’ intimate care relations at residential schools for Inuvialuit, Inuinnait, and Iñupiat peoples in Canada were bound up with the latter’s dispossession. Carolyn J. Eichner recounts the encounter between the Indigenous Kanak people and Louise Michel, a feminist and participant in the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871 who was banished to New Caledonia for seven years; Eichner argues that although Michel was staunchly anti-imperialist, her liberatory political project bore the temporal logics of colonization. Drawing on examples of Nahua reconfigurations of Christian scripture, Kenna Neitch proposes the language of “persistence” as a heuristic for avoiding the reactive, relational connotations that can pervade scholarly usages of “resistance” rhetoric. Next, our review essay by Jennifer McLerran describes recent Indigenous feminist scholarship that recasts the concept of sovereignty. Our News and Views piece focuses on modalities of occupation in the context of Kashmir: Nosheen Ali, Mona Bhan, Sahana Ghosh, Hafsa Kanjwal, Zunaira Komal, Deepti Misri, Shruti Mukherjee, Nishant Upadhyay, Saiba Varma, and Ather Zia argue that occupation is foundational to the making and reproduction of nationstates, and not exceptional to state power. The varied forms of resistance to occupation are examined by Sara Ihmoud in her article about how a group of Palestinian women, the Murabitat al-Haram, agitate for religious freedom simply by “staying in place.” Rabab Abdulhadi comments on shifts in contemporary settler colonial discourse in Israel, noting the increasingly overt and unapologetic deployment of highly sexualized and gendered images. Marina Tyquiengco examines the art of Australian Aboriginal artist Fiona Foley, specifically her Black Velvet series. Art and myth are also fused in Shantell Powell’s textual and visual rendering of Inuit memory. This issue features a range of poetry on topics such as language loss, human-land relationships, and sexual violence, written by Katherine Agyemaa Agard, Kei Kaimana, and Kai Minosh Pyle, and curated by our creative writing editor, Alexis Pauline Gumbs. In “Átaw Iwá Ichishkíin Sínwit: The Importance of Ichishkíin Language in Advancing Indigenous Feminist Education,” Michelle M. Jacob, Preface 285 Virginia R. Beavert, Regan Anderson, Leilani Sabzalian, and Joana Jansen examine Indigenous feminist praxis surrounding Ichishkíin-language education. They critique how Western education systems inflict pernicious forms of violence within Native communities, engaging in practices of linguistic genocide and alienating Indigenous peoples from their homelands. In response, Native peoples, along with non-Native allies, are engaging in educational and political activism to reclaim and revitalize Indigenous languages and ecological perspectives. In examining the foundational teaching of Ichishk... (shrink)

Interest in the relationship between race and the expanded reproduction of capitalism has exploded across the social sciences and humanities over the past several years. Despite this widespread appreciation and interest, profound disagreement, debate, and analytical impression persists, not least regarding the relationship between race and the necessary ‘laws of motion’ of capitalist society. This article begins by tracing the core approaches to the race and capitalism conversation, paying particular attention to their understanding of the necessity/contingency distinction. It then proceeds (...) to make the case for race as a contingent – which, emphatically, does not mean local or insignificant – relatively autonomous, and historically path-dependent terrain of struggle in capitalist society, which has largely functioned to maintain capital’s necessary disequilibrium between the value form and its value relations, but need not do so. It closes by exploring the implications of this claim in relation to recent historical-geographical research on post-1898 US imperialism. (shrink)

Recently the idea that race is biologically real has gained more traction. One argument against this claim is that the populations identified by science do not sufficiently map onto the concept of race as deployed in the relevant racial discourse, namely folk racial discourse. Call that concept the concept of race-f. Robin Andreasen (2005) argues that this "mismatch" criticism fails, on a variety of grounds including: ordinary folk semantically defer to scientists; scientists can disagree about facts; historians disagree (...) about the origins of the term 'race'; 'race' has had a diversity of meanings; some of those meanings privileges geography over visible traits; and that the scientific definition of 'race' is autonomous from the folk definition of 'race.' It is argued here that all of these responses to the mismatch criticism do not succeed, and that the last in fact vindicates it. Similar arguments to the last, autonomy argument, are also examined. (shrink)

Whether Kant’s late legal theory and his theory of race are contradictory in their account of colonialism has been a much-debated question that is also of highest importance for the evaluation of the Enlightenment’s contribution to Europe’s colonial expansion and the dispossession and enslavement of native and black peoples. This article discusses the problem by introducing the discourse on barbarism. This neglected discourse is the original and traditional European colonial vocabulary and served the justification of colonialism from ancient Greece throughout (...) the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. Kant’s explicit rejection of this discourse and its prejudices reveals his early critical stance toward colonial judgements of native peoples even before he developed his legal theory. This development of his critical position can be traced in his writings on race: although he makes racist statements in these texts, his theory of race is not meant to ground moral judgements on ‘races’ or a racial hierarchy but to defend the unity of mankind under the given empirical reality of colonial hierarchies. (shrink)

In Haiti, as in many developing countries, the prospect of enhancing food sovereignty faces serious structural constraints. In particular, trade liberalization has deepened patterns of food import dependence and the export orientation of peasant farming. But there are also powerful cultural dimensions to food import dependence that further problematize the challenge of pro-poor agrarian change. Food cultures are sometimes underappreciated in the food sovereignty literature, which tends to assume that there will be a preference for local or ‘culturally appropriate’ foods. (...) In Haiti, historically ingrained and persistent ideologies of racism magnify class hierarchies and the common perceptions of peasants at the bottom of the social order. This paper explores the intersection of socially constructed ideologies of racism with peasant aspirations for socio-cultural mobility, drawing from 30 qualitative interviews with key informants in government, non-governmental organizations, and social movements, and 108 qualitative interviews and 216 food preference surveys that were conducted in three sites in rural Haiti between November 2010 and July 2013. The core argument is that racially-coded class hierarchies exert a powerful influence on dietary aspirations, as ‘peasant’ foods like millet, root crops and molasses bread are commonly denigrated by Haiti’s poor, including peasants themselves, while ‘elite’ and ‘foreign’ foods like white flour bread, Corn Flakes, and spaghetti get held up as superior. This suggests a need to appreciate how the cultural geographies of food interact with—and can in fact exacerbate—political and economic inequalities, which raises challenging questions for peasant movements and advocates of food sovereignty. (shrink)

In this article, I briefly sketch the “right to opacity” that Édouard Glissant details in Poetics of Relation and situate it as an ethical imperative with Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, contrasting the distinctive contributions of opacity and ambiguity toward ethical-political living. I apply the principles of opacity and ambiguity toward one of Beauvoir’s most political and only co-written works, Pour Djamila Boupacha. I argue that the polyvalent use of the Islamic veil during the Algerian War for Independence reveals (...) the ethical application of opacity and ambiguity. Additionally, the veil clarifies the political stakes of gendered assumptions and racial hierarchy across geographies, positing a false body neutrality that obfuscates the violent global War on Terror. (shrink)

This article politicises the discourse of emerging markets in global finance. The black-boxed appearance of credit markets easily obscures the significant amount of subjective evaluation and cultural work that underpins capital flows. This article reveals the colonial, masculine, and racial imagination that informs the articulation of emerging markets as geographies of risk and profit. This brings into view the postcolonial nature of contemporary finance and how colonialism’s regimes of power and knowledge remain crucial for the reproduction of the global (...) political economy. To illustrate this point, the article highlights the sociality of credit practices. Contrary to their mathematical appearance, credit is a relationship with the future, mediated by social imaginations of trust. Focusing on emerging markets as ‘risk-versus-reward’ investments, this article examines the long-term colonial histories embedded in modern investment discourses. The article aims to show the continuing relevance this history plays for emerging market economies in modern financial markets and their political economies. (shrink)

We understand from the oldest sources that have reached us that according to their status, racial characteristics, culture, religion etc. people called their adressees with many different names besides their own names. The Arabic nicknames and titles, which are the main subject of our research result of this necessity. Before the formation of Islamic culture and civilization, different titles were used in all civilizations, especially in the Byzantine and Sassanid empires, for the members of the group, which were considered (...) as the elite class, apart from their names. Of course, the Arab society of jahiliyyah was also greatly influenced by his. In the political and bureaucratic structure created by the rapid spread of Islam and the interaction from different civilizations, a new naming, or rather nicknames, were made by using religious figures. This happened to such extend that the original names of many rulers remained in the shadows. The strict centralist structure of the Umayyad state required an authoritarian state administration that would not need excessive credit or definition. Therefore, the caliph did not need an extra nickname or title to define himself. At the same time, it would be appropriate to say that they never had any thoughts of praising the politicians and bureaucrats affiliated with them. The radical change in the political understanding with the Abbasid revolution also led to a great change in naming strategies. In fact, it is possible to explain the differentiation in this management approach through titles in the shortest way. The famous names of the Abbasid caliphs are nothing but nicknames. These names, which are adorned with the words of Allah, are actually an effort to show religious sensitivity to the subjects. The sensitivity in the language of diplomacy has come to the fore even more with the special divans established. The language of religion and the language of politics have been intertwined, and the caliph, who is the representative of the creator on earth, has been giving nicknames/titles around him. We see the actual situation of this practice as concrete in relation to the vassal states. During the Abbasid period, the level of relations between the states, which first emerged as semi-independent and later independent, and the caliphate differed according to time and conditions. In proportion to the political power of the Abbasid state, these heads of state were given different ranks. In this research, we try to reveal the background of the ranks given to the heads of vassal state established in the Khorasan and Transoxiana region and carrying out very important activities in the political sense. Additionally, we aim reveal to find out the political, religious and social structure of Tahirids, Saffarids, and Samanids, who are also very important in terms of Turkish history and serve as a bridge between the region and the center of the caliphate, Baghdad. We think that the subject discussed is important in order to discover the unknown aspects of the historical process in the political and bureaucratic formation of the Turkish empires established after the collapse of these three vassal states. In fact, it can be said that even today, the historical anatomy of the ranks used in terms of status determination and the arrangement of the political field in different Islamic geographies is being explored. Most importantly, in this study, we try discover the cornerstones of the communication dimension of the mawali with the Arab power. The location of the Transoxiana and Khorasan geographies before the Islamic conquests and the population fluidity accelerated by the Turkish migrations were an important factor in the political formation of the region during the Abbasid period. The historical background was taken into consideration in the titles given to the vassal state rulers. It is remarkable that the caliph gave the old Turkish title “ıhsid” to a Turkish leader of a state established in Egypt. There are many other examles such as this with regard to the vassal states in the East. The conclusion we have obtained from our study is that titles play a decisive role in the political connection between the center of the caliphate and the affiliated states. On the one hand, this regulates the balance between the center and local administrators, on the other hand, it determines the moral as well as the material rank of the sultans in the eyes of the people. In fact, the successes in the conquests led the caliphs to rank the vassal sultans with titles. This situation is a kind of password that determines the balance between the religious authority, the caliphate, and the worldly authority. (shrink)

A premodern philosophy of race and racism in Thomas Aquinas resolves some seeming oppositions between the three most current theories of race. Thomas’s generational account of race is primary. It affirms the racial naturalist view that there are biological differences between people, and some of which stem from a characteristic genotype and geography. Thomas’s individual account of race is secondary but nevertheless a necessary clarification of the generational account. It affirms the racial skeptic view that these (...) class='Hi'>racial characteristic properties are individual properties, not essential or specific properties, and as such cannot lead to a definite, essential being that is a ‘race.’ Thomas’s intersubjective account of race is tertiary, insofar as it presumes the generational and individual accounts, and yet crucially explains a peculiar social reality. It affirms the racial constructionist view that the intention by which we understand the notion of race is a socially constituted object, a mind-dependent reality informed by experience. (shrink)

The charge of treason and the judgment of insanity have left questions that invariably intrude on an assessment of Pound’s life and work. Critics frequently adopt a strategy of separating the life and the work, but tactical review is often necessary. There is a lightness in Pound’s writing that speaks of a being detached from the concerns of the world. Yet with his economic theory of social credit, his political and racial views, as well as his concern for other (...) writers, he is of the world—in the world and part of it. He was decidedly not tied to geography. He had no region or period, and he was as comfortable in Confucian China as in Dante’s Florence or twentieth-century Rome. He could work anywhere. He wrote The Pisan Cantos while jailed in Italy. The Cantos were published while he was in a mental wart at St. Elizabeths, yet a court found that he could not understand the charges against him. Can such an impairment and such achievement occur at the same time? If you say no, then what of the treason? Did he feign madness to escape punishment? Could Pound have been convicted of treason?In this paper, I intend to examine what has been loosely referred to as “the trial of Ezra Pound” and to show that Pound’s case should have been brought to trial within one or two years after his commitment to St. Elizabeths because he had a reasonable chance of being found not guilty of treason; even if found guilty, the circumstances in mitigation of a long prison term would have been so evident that he would have likely spent considerably less time in prison than he spent locked up at the mental institution. I will do this, in part, by reviewing the similarities and differences between Pound’s case and three other treason cases that came to trial within the first years after World War II. The English case, Rex v. Joyce, was tried shortly after the close of the war and well before Pound’s competency hearing on 13 February 1945.3 The law applied in Joyce would have led Pound’s lawyer to seek some postponement of trial until the American courts decided whether to follow the English lead. The other two cases involve the Americans, Douglas Chandler and Robert Best, employees of German radio, who were indicted with Pound in 1943. 3. William Joyce was an American who came to be known as “Lord Haw Haw.” He was hanged at Wandsworth, England, 3 Jan. 1946. He was the best known of the “radio traitors.” He began his programs, “This is Jairmany calling,” and would then prophesy the destruction of English towns and cities. The name “Lord Haw Haw” was created by the English journalist, Jonah Barrington, to ridicule Joyce and to make him appear idiotic. Conrad L. Rushing is a Superior Court Judge in California and an occasional lecturer in law at the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches a course in law and literature at the California Judges College and is a founder of the Sane Jose Poetry Center. (shrink)

While the presence of monsters in popular culture is ever-increasing, their use as an explicit or implicit category to frame, stigmatise, and demonise the other is seemingly on the rise. At the same time, academic interest for monsters is ever-growing. Usually, monstrosity is understood as a category that emerges to signal a transgression to a given order; this approach has led to the demystification of the insidious characterisations of the (racial, sexual, physical) other as monstrous. While this effort has (...) been necessary, its collateral effects have reduced the monstrous to a mere (socio-cultural) construction of the other: a dialectical framing that de facto deprives monstrosity from any reality. 'Monstrous Ontologies: Politics, Ethics, Materiality' proffers the necessity of challenging these monstrous otherings and their perverse socio-political effects, whilst also asserting that the monstrous is not simply an epistemological construct, but that it has an ontological reality. There is a profound difference between monsters and monstrosity. While the former is an often sterile political and social simplification, the end-product of rhetorical and biopolitical apparatuses; the latter may be understood as a dimension that nurtures the un-definable, that is, that shows the limits of these apparatuses by embodying their material excess: not a 'cultural frame', but the limit to the very mechanism of 'framing'. The monstrous expresses the combining, hybridising, becoming, and creative potential of socio-natural life, albeit colouring this powerful vitalism with the dark hue of a fearful, disgusting, and ultimately indigestible reality that cannot simply be embraced with multicultural naivety. As such, it forces us towards radically changing not the categories, but the very mechanisms of categorisation through which reality is framed and acted upon. Here lies the profound ethical dimension that monstrosity forces us to acknowledge; here lies its profoundly political potential, one that cannot be unfolded by merely deconstructing monstrosity, and rather requires to engage with its uncomfortable, appalling, and revealing materiality. This book will appeal to postgraduate students, PostDocs, and academics alike in the fields of philosophy, critical theory, humanities, sociology and social theory, criminology, human geography, and critical legal theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism by K. Melchor Quick Hall and Gwyn KirkCecilia Herles (bio)K. Melchor Quick Hall and Gwyn Kirk, Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and Beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. ISBN- 978-1-7936-3946-2K. Melchor Quick Hall and Gwyn Kirk are leading feminist authors who have beautifully woven together an inspiring and diverse collection of essays in the (...) anthology, Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism. What does it take to gather together some of the most eloquent voices of activists, teachers, farmers, artists, and organizers in an anthology focused on engaging with and beyond ecowomanism and ecofeminism, and what could this cultivate? I find Hall and Kirk's reflections on the process and their approach to collaboration illustrate some of the tools needed to address complex issues of disasters, the global pandemic, climate justice, white supremacy, gender oppression, and practices of domination. Their approach is to build relationships, acknowledge vulnerability, and appreciate differences in experiences. It seems fitting that this project initially began with Margo Okazawa-Rey who connected Hall and Kirk together. Okazawa-Rey's introduction generated the openness needed to bring this collection to fruition. Mapping as the thematic image of this collection is found in destructive boundary-making, the violence of enslavement, wars, and the dumping of contaminants in the environment. Mapping is also evident in the physical, temporal, and evolving locations in which Okazawa-Rey's work of sustaining community and recognizing interconnections across locations opens up the time and spaces to envision peace.This collection marks a shift away from the elitism of academic spaces by illuminating connections between community and university, and actively resisting against patriarchal notions of what counts as expertise and scholarship. The anthology draws attention to personal experiences as fundamentally relevant to perspectives about place, location, and [End Page 97] belonging and relations with land, water, sky and nonhumans. It begins with an autobiographical account by Hall who brilliantly weaves together her life story with her analytical insight in illustrating how Black geographies show spaces as often hard to map and in flux for the marginalized. In "Darkness All around Me: Black Waters, Land, Animals, and Sky" Hall notes how she is unable to discuss her understanding and relationship with Nature outside of being a Black Woman. When she poses the question, "how would our maps be different if they were rooted in the histories and realities of people of color?" (23) Hall pivots mapping to the contingent, unstable complexities that mark Black people's relations with land and food. In doing so, Hall reveals compelling insights into trauma, anxieties, and relationships with land and water in shifting landscapes. Connecting to the mission of Soul Fire Farm, to resist the US food apartheid and mobilize towards food justice, Hall reveals the possibilities for reparative healing properties in agricultural activities at Soul Fire Farm. Hall's narrative about racialized hierarchies recognizes how human hierarchies are connected to human-nonhuman animal divisions, raising the question of "How might we imagine freeing ourselves and other animals from the systems that seek to devalue us as (human and nonhuman) beings?" (27). Hall intervenes and challenges geographical mapping centered in white frameworks rooted in claims of stolen territories and measured in segregation and displacement. Pointing to Black shoals, Black food geographies, and Afrofuturism, to name a few, Hall is marking potential paths to shared liberation. Although Hall does not identify strongly as ecofeminist nor ecowomanist, this provides a promising direction for ecowomanist and ecofeminist inquiries, speaking to the need to explore what it takes for shared liberation. This direction also has the potential to offer insight into an alternative mapping for disability justice. Hall's acknowledgement of "being out of place" connects to the disability justice work of Sunaura Taylor (2014) and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) in the mapping of access in describing surroundings and focusing on interconnectedness.In Kirk's autobiographical account, "Roots, Branches, Wings" she points to how Margo Okazawa-Rey (2020) introduced her to philosopher Alan Rosenberg's (1998) distinction between knowing and understanding. In contrast to knowing facts that... (shrink)

First published in 1912, and originally intended as a textbook for students in secondary school, this book gives an overview of the human and physical geography of the occupied areas of the earth's surface. The text is richly illustrated with diagrams, tables, and contemporary photographs of places of interest. Although in general Dicks manages to rise above the colonial viewpoint prevalent at the time, certain aspects of the text are reflective of racial attitudes during this period of the (...) twentieth century. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of education. (shrink)

The Handbook on Governmentality discusses the development of an interdisciplinary field of research, focusing on Michel Foucault's post-foundationalist concept of governmentality and the ways it has been used to write genealogies of modern states, the governance of societal problems and the governance of the self. Bringing together an international group of contributors, the Handbook examines major developments in debates on governmentality, as well as encouraging further research in areas such as climate change, decolonial politics, logistics, and populism. Chapters explore how (...) governmentality reshapes policy analysis as political practice, the relationship between Foucault's ideas of government and postcolonial experiences, and how governmentality can illuminate discourse on the green economy and biopolitics. Analysing how contemporary socio-political issues including feminist politics, migration, and racialized medicine are interwoven with the concept of governmentality, this Handbook sheds light on the modern-day uses of Foucault's work. Providing a comprehensive overview of research on governmentality, this Handbook will be essential reading for students and scholars of development studies, geopolitics, political economy, organizational studies, political geography, postcolonial theory, and public policy. It will also be a key resource for policy makers in the field looking for a deeper theoretical understanding of the topic. (shrink)

What allows theories to evolve, to progress? A contentious notion, progress still haunts a number of contemporary theories. However, little research invites us to rethink progress in a comprehensive way. In this article, I contribute to this issue by considering the paradigmatic case of David Harvey’s Marxism. A pathbreaking thinker in geography, sociology, and urban studies, Harvey claims his theory intrinsically surpasses its inherent contradictions. However, numerous authors suggest otherwise, as it fails to engage with essential urban processes such (...) as those based on state, gendered, racial, or environmental dynamics. These aspects of social life challenge his dialectical ambition. I argue that Harvey’s attachment to an orthodox Marxism ultimately limits his claim to theoretical progress. Reviewing Harvey’s overall body of work, I focus on his metatheory regarding space and his examination of the Paris Commune. I argue that his ideas on the progress of theory follow from his dialectical assumptions, which in turn inhibit his portrayal of practical realities and a continuous dialogue with concrete cases. (shrink)

I analyze Hegel’s conception of nationality in order to make clear how he conceives the precise relation between the state and religion. This analysis also allows me to draw conclusions about whether Hegel can be considered racist or Eurocentric. My project involves understanding nationality as Hegel presents it in the anthropology: viz., as a form of spirit immersed in nature and closely related to geography. The geographical features of a nation’s land are reflected in its national religion; its nation-state (...) is a positive expression of this national religion; national religion further functions to reconcile a nation to the particular positive character of its nation-state. Yet as nation-states clash and collapse in history (i.e. the state proper), an absolute (non-national) religion emerges which reconciles its adherents not to the positive form of a certain nation-state, but to the state proper, i.e. the course of world history: this is “Christianity.” Christianity is not a national religion, tied to a certain part of the natural world, but, oddly, it does emerge with a certain peculiar ‘nation’: the “Germans.” Contrary to appearances, the “Germans” for Hegel are necessarily not a nation or race in the traditional sense, because as the vehicle for the absolute religion, their ‘nationality’ is not a form of spirit immersed in nature. Instead, the “Germans” (the apex of history) are beyond race and nationality. Any representation of the “Germans” as exclusively white or European, by Hegel or anyone else, is thus false: the “German” and “Christian” spirit is really just the modern spirit, which is necessarily trans-racial and trans-national. (shrink)

This edited volume presents critical scholarship analysing governance practices in diverse jurisdictions in Europe and North America, at multiple scales, and in relation to several different arenas of policy and practice. The contributors address shortcomings in the mainstream literature on governance within the discipline of political science. The volume as a whole is marked by geographical and topical diversity. However, what the individual chapters have in common is that each considers whether and how gender, racialized identity, and/or other axes of (...) marginalization are visible within the conceptualizations and/or practices of governance under discussion. Drawing together insights and conceptual tools from both feminist and post-structuralist frameworks in analysing governance practices, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and graduates who engage with feminist and/or post-structural analysis of policy and governance. It will also be of use to critical policy scholars in anthropology, geography, sociology, and women's studies. (shrink)

Spatial Practices makes a timely and significant contribution to the growing literature on social/spatial theory. In it the notion of spacial practice takes on a rich and layered meaning for some of America's leading scholars as they critically link the theoretical practices of the space of their disciplines to the practical social space of everyday political and economic urban life. Original essays provide compelling insights into the space of racial politics, the unavoidability of recognizing a radical planning practice, and (...) the imagistic face of the contemporary "figured" city. The reader will find rich conceptual tools presented in discussions that grapple with issues raised by the production of reduced public space in common interest developments and the ubiquitous mall, the ideologies of economic restructuring, the rhetorical politics of urban revitalization, and the analytic potential of the photo/text. Students and scholars interested in how spatial theory has enriched and renewed urban theory will find Spatial Practices invaluable. It will be useful in a wide range of classes across disciplines including urban studies, urban planning, architecture, political science, sociology, geography, economics, and policy studies. "This collection explores the exciting analytical edge where investigations of urban political economy converge with cultural studies. In their exploration of theory and practice as they relate to the production of space, the authors cover a dazzling range of topics. Yet despite their varying preoccupations, the essays merge into a unified inquiry that reveals the functions and meanings of contemporary spatial forms. All those who are interested in the forces shaping urban and regional development, as well as in the impact of space on social relations, must read this book. (shrink)

Investigating the reality and significance of racial categories, Remapping Race in a Global Context examines the role of race in human genomics, biomedicine, and struggles for social justice around the world. In this book, biologists, anthropologists, historians, and philosophers inspect critical questions around the biological reality of race and how it has been understood in different national and regional contexts. The essays also examine debates on the usefulness of race in medical and epidemiological studies. With focus on the fields (...) of human genomics and biomedicine, this book presents critical findings on whether and how race might be ethically and epistemologically justified in our age of personalized medicine, mass surveillance, and biased algorithms. The book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in a broad range of scientific and humanistic disciplines, including biology, anthropology, geography, philosophy, cultural or community studies, critical race theory, and any field concerned with the deep racial dividing lines running across societies globally. (shrink)

This article sketches an archaeology of the racial divide between North Africa and “Black Africa” by examining how it belongs to the emergence of modern geography during the nineteenth century. It argues that the de-Africanization of North Africa is inseparable from the racial identi????ication of “Africa proper”—to quote Hegel’s word—with a dehumanizing concept of Blackness. The second part of the article tries to move beyond archaeology in order to analyze counter-geographies of decolonization. It does so by focussing (...) on the ways in which the continental Pan-Africanism of the Algerian revolution has deployed a practical criticism of the divide between North and Black Africa through Fanon. (shrink)

International economic law is peculiar. It claims universal character, yet eschews engagement with many, if not all, the racialised features of the global political economy. Its scholars mostly ignore imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism; they exclude slavery, predation, and racism altogether. In the following article, we draw upon Walter Rodney’s dialectics of development to offer a racial capitalist critique of international economic law. The disciplinary boundaries and operative logic normalised by its denizens corral us in a white, Eurocentric episteme. Ahistoricism, (...) decontextualisation, and externalisation are three epistemic devices at the forefront of the exclusionary discourse of IEL. In this space, the histories and epistemologies of Black peoples are ghettoised, treated as alien to the framework. After identifying this bias, we use the Black Radical Tradition to evaluate IEL’s amenability to the racial capitalism critique. (shrink)

Geographies of Exclusion identifies forms of social and spatial exclusion and subsequently examines the fate of knowledge of space and society which has been produced by members of excluded groups. Evaluating writing on urban society by women and black writers, David Sibley asks why such work is neglected by the academic establishment, suggesting that both the practices which result in the exclusion of minorities and those which result in the exclusion of knowledge have important implications for theory and method in (...) human geography. Drawing on a range of ideas from social anthropology, feminist theory, sociology, human geography and psychoanalysis, this book presents a fresh approach to geographical theory, highlighting the tendency of powerful groups to "purify" space and to view minorites as defiled and polluting, and exploring the nature of "difference" and the production of knowledge. (shrink)

Racial epithets are terms used to characterize people on the basis of their race, and are often used to harm the people that they target. But what do racial epithets mean, and how do they work to harm in the way that they do? In this essay I set out to answer these questions by offering a pragmatic view of racial epithets, while contrasting my position with Christopher Hom's semantic view.

The paper addresses the issue of whether there is something morally defective with someone who sexually prefers members of a particular race or ethnic group (or someone who does not sexually desire or prefer members of a particular race or ethnic group). People with such “racial desires” are often viewed as racists, but virtually no sustained arguments have been given in support of this view. The paper reconstructs three possible arguments—those based in discrimination, exclusion, and stereotypes—that might support the (...) charge of racism. It argues that none is convincing. It further argues that only in some cases are people with racial desires racist, but that in those cases their racism is not because of their sexual desires. (shrink)

The Geography of Morals is a work of extraordinary ambition: an indictment of the parochialism of Western philosophy, a comprehensive dialogue between cultural and psychological anthropology, recent work in empirical moral psychology, behavioral economics, and cross-cultural philosophy.