Nicola Lacey, David Soskice, Leonidas Cheliotis, and Sappho Xenakis (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780197266922
- eISBN:
- 9780191938184
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266922.001.0001
- Subject:
- Law
The question of inequality has moved decisively to the top of the contemporary intellectual agenda. Going beyond Thomas Piketty’s focus on wealth, increasing inequalities of various kinds, and their ...
More
The question of inequality has moved decisively to the top of the contemporary intellectual agenda. Going beyond Thomas Piketty’s focus on wealth, increasing inequalities of various kinds, and their impact on social, political and economic life, now present themselves among the most urgent issues facing scholars in the humanities and the social sciences. Key among these is the relationship between inequality, crime and punishment. The propositions that social inequality shapes crime and punishment, and that crime and punishment themselves cause or exacerbate inequality, are conventional wisdom. Yet, paradoxically, they are also controversial. In this volume, historians, criminologists, lawyers, sociologists and political scientists come together to try to solve this paradox by unpacking these relationships in different contexts. The causal mechanisms underlying these correlations call for investigation by means of a sustained programme of research bringing different disciplines to bear on the problem. This volume develops an interdisciplinary approach which builds on but goes beyond recent comparative and historical research on the institutional, cultural and political-economic factors shaping crime and punishment so as better to understand whether, and if so how and why, social and economic inequality influences levels and types of crime and punishment, and conversely whether crime and punishment shape inequalities.Less
The question of inequality has moved decisively to the top of the contemporary intellectual agenda. Going beyond Thomas Piketty’s focus on wealth, increasing inequalities of various kinds, and their impact on social, political and economic life, now present themselves among the most urgent issues facing scholars in the humanities and the social sciences. Key among these is the relationship between inequality, crime and punishment. The propositions that social inequality shapes crime and punishment, and that crime and punishment themselves cause or exacerbate inequality, are conventional wisdom. Yet, paradoxically, they are also controversial. In this volume, historians, criminologists, lawyers, sociologists and political scientists come together to try to solve this paradox by unpacking these relationships in different contexts. The causal mechanisms underlying these correlations call for investigation by means of a sustained programme of research bringing different disciplines to bear on the problem. This volume develops an interdisciplinary approach which builds on but goes beyond recent comparative and historical research on the institutional, cultural and political-economic factors shaping crime and punishment so as better to understand whether, and if so how and why, social and economic inequality influences levels and types of crime and punishment, and conversely whether crime and punishment shape inequalities.
Nicola Lacey and David Soskice
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780197266922
- eISBN:
- 9780191938184
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266922.003.0001
- Subject:
- Law
The propositions that social inequality shapes crime and punishment, and that crime and punishment themselves cause or exacerbate inequality, are conventional wisdom. Yet, paradoxically, they are ...
More
The propositions that social inequality shapes crime and punishment, and that crime and punishment themselves cause or exacerbate inequality, are conventional wisdom. Yet, paradoxically, they are also controversial. In this volume, historians, criminologists, lawyers, sociologists and political scientists come together to try to solve this paradox. This introduction examines some of the main intersections and points of productive dialogue emerging from the essays, organised around two key themes: the insights to be gained by moving between different levels of analysis; and the importance of the perspective provided by comparative and historical lenses. It concludes that a high crime/punishment/inequality equilibrium is associated with deep failures of incorporation, integration and inclusion in the social, political and economic systems which it afflicts. And these failures of inclusion operate in terms of certain key dynamics: segregation; de facto or de jure disenfranchisement; and failures of coordinating capacity which are premised not only on institutional design but also on the diversity of and conflict between interests.Less
The propositions that social inequality shapes crime and punishment, and that crime and punishment themselves cause or exacerbate inequality, are conventional wisdom. Yet, paradoxically, they are also controversial. In this volume, historians, criminologists, lawyers, sociologists and political scientists come together to try to solve this paradox. This introduction examines some of the main intersections and points of productive dialogue emerging from the essays, organised around two key themes: the insights to be gained by moving between different levels of analysis; and the importance of the perspective provided by comparative and historical lenses. It concludes that a high crime/punishment/inequality equilibrium is associated with deep failures of incorporation, integration and inclusion in the social, political and economic systems which it afflicts. And these failures of inclusion operate in terms of certain key dynamics: segregation; de facto or de jure disenfranchisement; and failures of coordinating capacity which are premised not only on institutional design but also on the diversity of and conflict between interests.
Nicola Lacey and David Soskice
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780197266922
- eISBN:
- 9780191938184
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266922.003.0003
- Subject:
- Law
The United States is a fascinating case study in the complex links between crime, punishment and inequality, standing out as it does in terms of inequality as measured by a number of economic ...
More
The United States is a fascinating case study in the complex links between crime, punishment and inequality, standing out as it does in terms of inequality as measured by a number of economic standards; levels of serious violent crime; and rates of imprisonment, penal surveillance and post-conviction disqualifications. This chapter builds on the authors’ previous work arguing that the exceptional rise in violent crime and punishment in the US from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s can be explained by the interaction of four political and economic variables: ‘technological regime change’; ‘varieties of capitalism’ and ‘varieties of welfare state’; types of ‘political system’; and – critically and specifically – the US as a radical outlier in the degree of local democracy. Three further questions implied by the authors’ previous work are asked. First, why did such distinctive patterns of local democracy arise in America? And how is this political structure tied up with the history and politics of race? Second, what did the distinctive historical development of the US political economy in the 19th century imply for the structure of its criminal justice institutions? And third, why did the burden of crime and punishment come to fall so disproportionately on African Americans?Less
The United States is a fascinating case study in the complex links between crime, punishment and inequality, standing out as it does in terms of inequality as measured by a number of economic standards; levels of serious violent crime; and rates of imprisonment, penal surveillance and post-conviction disqualifications. This chapter builds on the authors’ previous work arguing that the exceptional rise in violent crime and punishment in the US from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s can be explained by the interaction of four political and economic variables: ‘technological regime change’; ‘varieties of capitalism’ and ‘varieties of welfare state’; types of ‘political system’; and – critically and specifically – the US as a radical outlier in the degree of local democracy. Three further questions implied by the authors’ previous work are asked. First, why did such distinctive patterns of local democracy arise in America? And how is this political structure tied up with the history and politics of race? Second, what did the distinctive historical development of the US political economy in the 19th century imply for the structure of its criminal justice institutions? And third, why did the burden of crime and punishment come to fall so disproportionately on African Americans?
Sappho Xenakis and Leonidas K. Cheliotis
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780197266922
- eISBN:
- 9780191938184
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266922.003.0004
- Subject:
- Law
There is no shortage of scholarly and other research on the reciprocal relationship that inequality bears to crime, victimisation and contact with the criminal justice system, both in the specific ...
More
There is no shortage of scholarly and other research on the reciprocal relationship that inequality bears to crime, victimisation and contact with the criminal justice system, both in the specific United States context and beyond. Often, however, inequality has been studied in conjunction with only one of the three phenomena at issue, despite the intersections that arguably obtain between them–and, indeed, between their respective connections with inequality itself. There are, moreover, forms of inequality that have received far less attention in pertinent research than their prevalence and broader significance would appear to merit. The purpose of this chapter is dual: first, to identify ways in which inequality’s linkages to crime, victimisation and criminal justice may relate to one another; and second, to highlight the need for a greater focus than has been placed heretofore on the role of institutionalised inequality of access to the political process, particularly as this works to bias criminal justice policy-making towards the preferences of financially motivated state lobbying groups at the expense of disadvantaged racial minorities. In so doing, the chapter singles out for analysis the US case and, more specifically, engages with key extant explanations of the staggering rise in the use of imprisonment in the country since the 1970s.Less
There is no shortage of scholarly and other research on the reciprocal relationship that inequality bears to crime, victimisation and contact with the criminal justice system, both in the specific United States context and beyond. Often, however, inequality has been studied in conjunction with only one of the three phenomena at issue, despite the intersections that arguably obtain between them–and, indeed, between their respective connections with inequality itself. There are, moreover, forms of inequality that have received far less attention in pertinent research than their prevalence and broader significance would appear to merit. The purpose of this chapter is dual: first, to identify ways in which inequality’s linkages to crime, victimisation and criminal justice may relate to one another; and second, to highlight the need for a greater focus than has been placed heretofore on the role of institutionalised inequality of access to the political process, particularly as this works to bias criminal justice policy-making towards the preferences of financially motivated state lobbying groups at the expense of disadvantaged racial minorities. In so doing, the chapter singles out for analysis the US case and, more specifically, engages with key extant explanations of the staggering rise in the use of imprisonment in the country since the 1970s.
Shannon Speed
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781469653129
- eISBN:
- 9781469653143
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469653129.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Native American Studies
Indigenous women migrants from Central America and Mexico face harrowing experiences of violence before, during, and after their migration to the United States, like all asylum seekers. But as ...
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Indigenous women migrants from Central America and Mexico face harrowing experiences of violence before, during, and after their migration to the United States, like all asylum seekers. But as Shannon Speed argues, the circumstances for Indigenous women are especially devastating, given their disproportionate vulnerability to neoliberal economic and political policies and practices in Latin America and the United States, including policing, detention, and human trafficking. Speed dubs this vulnerability "neoliberal multicriminalism" and identifies its relation to settler structures of Indigenous dispossession and elimination. Using innovative ethnographic practices to record and recount stories from Indigenous women in U.S. detention, Speed demonstrates that these women's vulnerability to individual and state violence is not rooted in a failure to exercise agency. Rather, it is a structural condition, created and reinforced by settler colonialism, which consistently deploys racial and gender ideologies to manage the ongoing business of occupation and capitalist exploitation.
With sensitive narration and sophisticated analysis, this book reveals the human consequences of state policy and practices throughout the Americas and adds vital new context for understanding the circumstances of migrants seeking asylum in the United States.Less
Indigenous women migrants from Central America and Mexico face harrowing experiences of violence before, during, and after their migration to the United States, like all asylum seekers. But as Shannon Speed argues, the circumstances for Indigenous women are especially devastating, given their disproportionate vulnerability to neoliberal economic and political policies and practices in Latin America and the United States, including policing, detention, and human trafficking. Speed dubs this vulnerability "neoliberal multicriminalism" and identifies its relation to settler structures of Indigenous dispossession and elimination. Using innovative ethnographic practices to record and recount stories from Indigenous women in U.S. detention, Speed demonstrates that these women's vulnerability to individual and state violence is not rooted in a failure to exercise agency. Rather, it is a structural condition, created and reinforced by settler colonialism, which consistently deploys racial and gender ideologies to manage the ongoing business of occupation and capitalist exploitation.
With sensitive narration and sophisticated analysis, this book reveals the human consequences of state policy and practices throughout the Americas and adds vital new context for understanding the circumstances of migrants seeking asylum in the United States.
Jane H. Hong
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781469653365
- eISBN:
- 9781469653389
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469653365.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
Over the course of less than a century, the U.S. transformed from a nation that excluded Asians from immigration and citizenship to one that receives more immigrants from Asia than from anywhere else ...
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Over the course of less than a century, the U.S. transformed from a nation that excluded Asians from immigration and citizenship to one that receives more immigrants from Asia than from anywhere else in the world. Yet questions of how that dramatic shift took place have long gone unanswered. In this first comprehensive history of Asian exclusion repeal, Jane H. Hong unearths the transpacific movement that successfully ended restrictions on Asian immigration.
The mid-twentieth century repeal of Asian exclusion, Hong shows, was part of the price of America’s postwar empire in Asia. The demands of U.S. empire-building during an era of decolonization created new opportunities for advocates from both the U.S. and Asia to lobby U.S. Congress for repeal. Drawing from sources in the United States, India, and the Philippines, Opening the Gates to Asia charts a movement more than twenty years in the making. Positioning repeal at the intersection of U.S. civil rights struggles and Asian decolonization, Hong raises thorny questions about the meanings of nation, independence, and citizenship on the global stage.Less
Over the course of less than a century, the U.S. transformed from a nation that excluded Asians from immigration and citizenship to one that receives more immigrants from Asia than from anywhere else in the world. Yet questions of how that dramatic shift took place have long gone unanswered. In this first comprehensive history of Asian exclusion repeal, Jane H. Hong unearths the transpacific movement that successfully ended restrictions on Asian immigration.
The mid-twentieth century repeal of Asian exclusion, Hong shows, was part of the price of America’s postwar empire in Asia. The demands of U.S. empire-building during an era of decolonization created new opportunities for advocates from both the U.S. and Asia to lobby U.S. Congress for repeal. Drawing from sources in the United States, India, and the Philippines, Opening the Gates to Asia charts a movement more than twenty years in the making. Positioning repeal at the intersection of U.S. civil rights struggles and Asian decolonization, Hong raises thorny questions about the meanings of nation, independence, and citizenship on the global stage.
Arieh Bruce Saposnik
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195331219
- eISBN:
- 9780199868100
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195331219.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
Beginning with the Young Turk revolution in 1908, this chapter examines the changing conceptions of East and West as they were manifested in Yishuv culture. Zionism's call for a Jewish return to “the ...
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Beginning with the Young Turk revolution in 1908, this chapter examines the changing conceptions of East and West as they were manifested in Yishuv culture. Zionism's call for a Jewish return to “the East” was rooted in part in a broader European fascination with “the Orient.” This interest in the East coincided in time and in much of its imagery with a conceptual division of Europe itself into its “western” and “eastern” parts. The Jews were deeply implicated in these twin conceptualizations of the Orient and of Europe's own “Orient” at home, particularly with the notion that Jews constituted a semi‐Asiatic, foreign element in Europe. Competing images of Occident and Orient—resonating with a wide range of racial, social, political, and cultural overtones—would become not only central elements in efforts to create a new Hebrew language, art, and music but also defining aspects of the Yishuv's institutions, rituals, and national liturgy.Less
Beginning with the Young Turk revolution in 1908, this chapter examines the changing conceptions of East and West as they were manifested in Yishuv culture. Zionism's call for a Jewish return to “the East” was rooted in part in a broader European fascination with “the Orient.” This interest in the East coincided in time and in much of its imagery with a conceptual division of Europe itself into its “western” and “eastern” parts. The Jews were deeply implicated in these twin conceptualizations of the Orient and of Europe's own “Orient” at home, particularly with the notion that Jews constituted a semi‐Asiatic, foreign element in Europe. Competing images of Occident and Orient—resonating with a wide range of racial, social, political, and cultural overtones—would become not only central elements in efforts to create a new Hebrew language, art, and music but also defining aspects of the Yishuv's institutions, rituals, and national liturgy.
Juliet Hooker
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195335361
- eISBN:
- 9780199868995
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195335361.003.0002
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics
This chapter sketches the concepts of political solidarity and racialized solidarity. Contemporary political theorists have questioned the nature, scope, and basis of political solidarity: Is it ...
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This chapter sketches the concepts of political solidarity and racialized solidarity. Contemporary political theorists have questioned the nature, scope, and basis of political solidarity: Is it primarily affective (based on fellow feeling) or rational (based on a capacity to will the common good)? Is it best conceived in local or global terms? Does it spring from shared membership in a nation or a more universal humanity? They have had little to say about the impact of race on political solidarity, however. Political solidarity, it is argued, is best conceived as simultaneously having an important affective dimension and an ethical orientation that moves us to action; as multiple and overlapping; as the product of structural conditions that require individuals to develop contingent solidarities not dependent on common interests or identities; and as being fundamentally shaped by race.Less
This chapter sketches the concepts of political solidarity and racialized solidarity. Contemporary political theorists have questioned the nature, scope, and basis of political solidarity: Is it primarily affective (based on fellow feeling) or rational (based on a capacity to will the common good)? Is it best conceived in local or global terms? Does it spring from shared membership in a nation or a more universal humanity? They have had little to say about the impact of race on political solidarity, however. Political solidarity, it is argued, is best conceived as simultaneously having an important affective dimension and an ethical orientation that moves us to action; as multiple and overlapping; as the product of structural conditions that require individuals to develop contingent solidarities not dependent on common interests or identities; and as being fundamentally shaped by race.
Janet L. Abu-Lughod
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195328752
- eISBN:
- 9780199944057
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195328752.003.0002
- Subject:
- Sociology, Urban and Rural Studies
This chapter notes that the riot of 1919 was a sign that Chicago had a special problem. One of the most violent and prolonged in the history of the country, it became the object of an official ...
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This chapter notes that the riot of 1919 was a sign that Chicago had a special problem. One of the most violent and prolonged in the history of the country, it became the object of an official investigation by a newly organized Chicago Commission on Race Relations, which issued a very long and carefully researched and documented report, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Riot. The 1919 riot may be seen as signaling the start of two trends in racial conflict that would intensify in the ensuing decades. The first was a new militancy on the part of the black community to resist the typical white-on-black violence. The second, paradoxically, was the increased “ingathering” of blacks within a more fully segregated ghetto, as white violence drove scattered black residents from other areas of the city in which they already lived.Less
This chapter notes that the riot of 1919 was a sign that Chicago had a special problem. One of the most violent and prolonged in the history of the country, it became the object of an official investigation by a newly organized Chicago Commission on Race Relations, which issued a very long and carefully researched and documented report, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Riot. The 1919 riot may be seen as signaling the start of two trends in racial conflict that would intensify in the ensuing decades. The first was a new militancy on the part of the black community to resist the typical white-on-black violence. The second, paradoxically, was the increased “ingathering” of blacks within a more fully segregated ghetto, as white violence drove scattered black residents from other areas of the city in which they already lived.
Michael O. Emerson and George Yancey
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199742684
- eISBN:
- 9780199943388
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199742684.003.0013
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
For the scholars who disagree with the solutions put forward in the previous chapter, it is whites who must dismantle the racialized society. But since the majority group benefits from the racialized ...
More
For the scholars who disagree with the solutions put forward in the previous chapter, it is whites who must dismantle the racialized society. But since the majority group benefits from the racialized society, why would it be willing to work against its own racial advantage? From a utilitarian premise, no real reason exists for individuals in the majority group to want change the racial status quo. Another persistent problem for those advocating majority-group obligations is that past racial discrimination was quite blatant and easy to see. Advocates of racial solutions that emphasize majority-group obligations appeal to racial justice as a holistic approach for racial healing and thus a necessary component in solving the problems of racial alienation. This chapter explores racial justice and its importance in eliminating racism in the United States. It also discusses the concept of white responsibility, antiracism, the deconstruction of whiteness, reparations, critical race theory, multiculturalism, Marxism, and Cornel West's book entitled Race Matters (2001).Less
For the scholars who disagree with the solutions put forward in the previous chapter, it is whites who must dismantle the racialized society. But since the majority group benefits from the racialized society, why would it be willing to work against its own racial advantage? From a utilitarian premise, no real reason exists for individuals in the majority group to want change the racial status quo. Another persistent problem for those advocating majority-group obligations is that past racial discrimination was quite blatant and easy to see. Advocates of racial solutions that emphasize majority-group obligations appeal to racial justice as a holistic approach for racial healing and thus a necessary component in solving the problems of racial alienation. This chapter explores racial justice and its importance in eliminating racism in the United States. It also discusses the concept of white responsibility, antiracism, the deconstruction of whiteness, reparations, critical race theory, multiculturalism, Marxism, and Cornel West's book entitled Race Matters (2001).
Spencer Dew
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226647968
- eISBN:
- 9780226648156
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226648156.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
Noble Drew Ali, leader of the Moorish Science Temple of America movement in the early twentieth-century, taught that "citizenship is salvation." This book examines the legacy of Ali's thoughts on ...
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Noble Drew Ali, leader of the Moorish Science Temple of America movement in the early twentieth-century, taught that "citizenship is salvation." This book examines the legacy of Ali's thoughts on citizenship, law, and race in the MSTA and two other Aliite religions, the Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah and the Nuwaubian Yamassee movement. In all three African American religious movements, members insist on an identity other than "negro, black, or colored" as a way of insisting upon full citizenship as a status. Thinkers within these religions also reiterate Ali's claims about citizenship as a process, a work of "sacred duty" wherein, through activity ranging from voting to pro se legal performance, citizens contribute to the perfection of the world. Such claims not only respond to American racism in creative ways, they also advance an understanding of "law" as an eternal, metaphysical reality, divine, aligned with justice and truth. The work of citizenship, then, is aimed at aligning the unjust and oppressive legal system of the state with that of True Law.Less
Noble Drew Ali, leader of the Moorish Science Temple of America movement in the early twentieth-century, taught that "citizenship is salvation." This book examines the legacy of Ali's thoughts on citizenship, law, and race in the MSTA and two other Aliite religions, the Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah and the Nuwaubian Yamassee movement. In all three African American religious movements, members insist on an identity other than "negro, black, or colored" as a way of insisting upon full citizenship as a status. Thinkers within these religions also reiterate Ali's claims about citizenship as a process, a work of "sacred duty" wherein, through activity ranging from voting to pro se legal performance, citizens contribute to the perfection of the world. Such claims not only respond to American racism in creative ways, they also advance an understanding of "law" as an eternal, metaphysical reality, divine, aligned with justice and truth. The work of citizenship, then, is aimed at aligning the unjust and oppressive legal system of the state with that of True Law.
Katelyn E. Knox
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781781383094
- eISBN:
- 9781781384152
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781383094.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
In Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France Knox turns the tables France’s rhetoric of ‘internal otherness’, asking her reader not to spot those deemed France’s others but rather to ...
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In Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France Knox turns the tables France’s rhetoric of ‘internal otherness’, asking her reader not to spot those deemed France’s others but rather to deconstruct the very gazes that produce them. Weaving together a vast corpus of colonial French children’s comics, Francophone novels, and African popular music, fashion, and dance, Knox traces how the ways colonial ‘human zoos’ invited their French spectators to gaze on their colonized others still inform the frameworks through which racial and ethnic minorities are made—and make themselves—visible in contemporary France. In addition to analyzing how literature and music depicting immigration, immigrants and their descendants in France make race and ethnicity visible, Knox also illustrates how the works she analyzes self-reflexively ask whether they, as commodities sold within wider cultural marketplaces, perpetuate the culture of exoticism they seek to contest. Finally, Knox contends that to take seriously the way the texts interrogate the relationship between power, privilege, and the gaze also requires reconsidering the visions of normalcy from which racial and ethnic minorities supposedly depart. She thus concludes by exposing a critical ‘blind spot’ in French and Francophone cultural studies—whiteness—before subjecting it to the same scrutiny France’s ‘visible minorities’ face.Less
In Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France Knox turns the tables France’s rhetoric of ‘internal otherness’, asking her reader not to spot those deemed France’s others but rather to deconstruct the very gazes that produce them. Weaving together a vast corpus of colonial French children’s comics, Francophone novels, and African popular music, fashion, and dance, Knox traces how the ways colonial ‘human zoos’ invited their French spectators to gaze on their colonized others still inform the frameworks through which racial and ethnic minorities are made—and make themselves—visible in contemporary France. In addition to analyzing how literature and music depicting immigration, immigrants and their descendants in France make race and ethnicity visible, Knox also illustrates how the works she analyzes self-reflexively ask whether they, as commodities sold within wider cultural marketplaces, perpetuate the culture of exoticism they seek to contest. Finally, Knox contends that to take seriously the way the texts interrogate the relationship between power, privilege, and the gaze also requires reconsidering the visions of normalcy from which racial and ethnic minorities supposedly depart. She thus concludes by exposing a critical ‘blind spot’ in French and Francophone cultural studies—whiteness—before subjecting it to the same scrutiny France’s ‘visible minorities’ face.
Bowen Paulle
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226066387
- eISBN:
- 9780226066554
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226066554.001.0001
- Subject:
- Education, Secondary Education
Based on nearly six years of fieldwork in and around high poverty secondary schools on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, this book uses the tools of the teacher-ethnographer to take on questions ...
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Based on nearly six years of fieldwork in and around high poverty secondary schools on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, this book uses the tools of the teacher-ethnographer to take on questions touching us all: Even if they “know better,” why do so many adolescents frequently get caught up in the situated destruction of non-selective big city schools? Although putatively of the same race as many of the other students wrecking their educational environments, how do some male students self-identifying as black avoid the seductions of “street” ways of being and, in extremely rare cases, develop capacities for emotional self-control and concentration great enough to allow them to use their “failing ghetto schools” as launching pads into elite colleges? Inside their classrooms, why is it so difficult if not impossible for most teachers to consistently reproduce the triumphs of a handful of their colleagues rather than contribute, more or less forcefully, to their own “burn outs”? As the vignettes and biographical case studies woven into the empirical chapters reveal, adequate answers to these questions require that we move away from romanticized notions about resistance, disembodied fantasies about explicit cultural interpretations preceding real time actions, and essentialist assumptions about (the perpetual salience of) blackness and other seemingly discrete ethno-racial categories. Developing a fundamentally new way of thinking about everday dealing and self-destruction in fiercely segregated, physically unsafe, and emotionally toxic schools can help us avoid more pseudo-interventions and finally get serious about reforming the educational experiences of the poorly born.Less
Based on nearly six years of fieldwork in and around high poverty secondary schools on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, this book uses the tools of the teacher-ethnographer to take on questions touching us all: Even if they “know better,” why do so many adolescents frequently get caught up in the situated destruction of non-selective big city schools? Although putatively of the same race as many of the other students wrecking their educational environments, how do some male students self-identifying as black avoid the seductions of “street” ways of being and, in extremely rare cases, develop capacities for emotional self-control and concentration great enough to allow them to use their “failing ghetto schools” as launching pads into elite colleges? Inside their classrooms, why is it so difficult if not impossible for most teachers to consistently reproduce the triumphs of a handful of their colleagues rather than contribute, more or less forcefully, to their own “burn outs”? As the vignettes and biographical case studies woven into the empirical chapters reveal, adequate answers to these questions require that we move away from romanticized notions about resistance, disembodied fantasies about explicit cultural interpretations preceding real time actions, and essentialist assumptions about (the perpetual salience of) blackness and other seemingly discrete ethno-racial categories. Developing a fundamentally new way of thinking about everday dealing and self-destruction in fiercely segregated, physically unsafe, and emotionally toxic schools can help us avoid more pseudo-interventions and finally get serious about reforming the educational experiences of the poorly born.
B. Brian Foster
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781469660424
- eISBN:
- 9781469660448
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660424.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
How do you love and not like the same thing at the same time? This was the riddle that met Mississippi writer B. Brian Foster when he returned to his home state to learn about Black culture and found ...
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How do you love and not like the same thing at the same time? This was the riddle that met Mississippi writer B. Brian Foster when he returned to his home state to learn about Black culture and found himself hearing about the blues. One moment, Black Mississippians would say they knew and appreciated the blues. The next, they would say they didn’t like it. For five years, Foster listened and asked: “How?” “Why not?” “Will it ever change?” This is the story of the answers to his questions.
In this illuminating work, Foster takes us where not many blues writers and scholars have gone: into the homes, memories, speculative visions, and lifeworlds of Black folks in contemporary Mississippi to hear what they have to say about the blues and all that has come about since their forebears first sang them. In so doing, Foster urges us to think differently about race, place, and community development and models a different way of hearing the sounds of Black life, a method that he calls listening for the backbeat.Less
How do you love and not like the same thing at the same time? This was the riddle that met Mississippi writer B. Brian Foster when he returned to his home state to learn about Black culture and found himself hearing about the blues. One moment, Black Mississippians would say they knew and appreciated the blues. The next, they would say they didn’t like it. For five years, Foster listened and asked: “How?” “Why not?” “Will it ever change?” This is the story of the answers to his questions.
In this illuminating work, Foster takes us where not many blues writers and scholars have gone: into the homes, memories, speculative visions, and lifeworlds of Black folks in contemporary Mississippi to hear what they have to say about the blues and all that has come about since their forebears first sang them. In so doing, Foster urges us to think differently about race, place, and community development and models a different way of hearing the sounds of Black life, a method that he calls listening for the backbeat.
Henrice Altink
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781789620009
- eISBN:
- 9781789623697
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620009.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Social History
Informed by Critical Race Theory and based on a wide range of sources, including official sources, memoirs, and semi-autobiographical fiction, this book examines multiple forms of racial ...
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Informed by Critical Race Theory and based on a wide range of sources, including official sources, memoirs, and semi-autobiographical fiction, this book examines multiple forms of racial discrimination in Jamaica and how they were talked about and experienced from the end of the First World War until the demise of democratic socialism in the 1980. Case studies on, amongst others, the labour market, education, the family and legal system will demonstrate the extent to which race and colour shaped social relations in the island in the decades preceding and following independence and convey that racial discrimination was a public secret – everybody knew it took place but few dared to openly discuss or criticise it. The book ends with an examination of race and colour in contemporary Jamaica to show that after independence race and colour have lost little of their power and offers suggestions to overcome the silence on race to facilitate equality of opportunity for all.Less
Informed by Critical Race Theory and based on a wide range of sources, including official sources, memoirs, and semi-autobiographical fiction, this book examines multiple forms of racial discrimination in Jamaica and how they were talked about and experienced from the end of the First World War until the demise of democratic socialism in the 1980. Case studies on, amongst others, the labour market, education, the family and legal system will demonstrate the extent to which race and colour shaped social relations in the island in the decades preceding and following independence and convey that racial discrimination was a public secret – everybody knew it took place but few dared to openly discuss or criticise it. The book ends with an examination of race and colour in contemporary Jamaica to show that after independence race and colour have lost little of their power and offers suggestions to overcome the silence on race to facilitate equality of opportunity for all.
Ali Meghji
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526143075
- eISBN:
- 9781526150424
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526143082
- Subject:
- Sociology, Culture
This book analyses how racism and anti-racism influences Black British middle class cultural consumption. In doing so, this book challenges the dominant understanding of British middle class identity ...
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This book analyses how racism and anti-racism influences Black British middle class cultural consumption. In doing so, this book challenges the dominant understanding of British middle class identity and culture as being ‘beyond race’.
Paying attention to the relationship between cultural capital and cultural repertoires, this book puts forward the idea that there are three black middle-class identity modes: strategic assimilation, class-minded, and ethnoracial autonomous. People towards each of these identity modes use specific cultural repertoires to organise their cultural consumption. Those towards strategic assimilation draw on repertoires of code-switching and cultural equity, consuming traditional middle class culture to maintain an equality with the white middle-class in levels of cultural capital. Ethnoracial autonomous individuals draw on repertoires of browning and Afro-centrism, self-selecting out of traditional middle- class cultural pursuits they decode as ‘Eurocentric’, while showing a preference for cultural forms that uplift black diasporic histories and cultures. Lastly, those towards the class-minded identity mode draw on repertoires of post-racialism and de-racialisation. Such individuals polarise between ‘Black’ and middle class cultural forms, display an unequivocal preference for the latter, and lambast other black people who avoid middle-class culture as being culturally myopic or culturally uncultivated.
This book will appeal to sociology students, researchers, and academics working on race and class, critical race theory, and cultural sociology, among other social science disciplines.Less
This book analyses how racism and anti-racism influences Black British middle class cultural consumption. In doing so, this book challenges the dominant understanding of British middle class identity and culture as being ‘beyond race’.
Paying attention to the relationship between cultural capital and cultural repertoires, this book puts forward the idea that there are three black middle-class identity modes: strategic assimilation, class-minded, and ethnoracial autonomous. People towards each of these identity modes use specific cultural repertoires to organise their cultural consumption. Those towards strategic assimilation draw on repertoires of code-switching and cultural equity, consuming traditional middle class culture to maintain an equality with the white middle-class in levels of cultural capital. Ethnoracial autonomous individuals draw on repertoires of browning and Afro-centrism, self-selecting out of traditional middle- class cultural pursuits they decode as ‘Eurocentric’, while showing a preference for cultural forms that uplift black diasporic histories and cultures. Lastly, those towards the class-minded identity mode draw on repertoires of post-racialism and de-racialisation. Such individuals polarise between ‘Black’ and middle class cultural forms, display an unequivocal preference for the latter, and lambast other black people who avoid middle-class culture as being culturally myopic or culturally uncultivated.
This book will appeal to sociology students, researchers, and academics working on race and class, critical race theory, and cultural sociology, among other social science disciplines.
Jessica M. Kim
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781469651347
- eISBN:
- 9781469651361
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469651347.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
In this compelling narrative of capitalist development and revolutionary response, Jessica M. Kim reexamines the rise of Los Angeles from a small town to a global city against the backdrop of the ...
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In this compelling narrative of capitalist development and revolutionary response, Jessica M. Kim reexamines the rise of Los Angeles from a small town to a global city against the backdrop of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Gilded Age economics, and American empire. It is a far-reaching transnational history, chronicling how Los Angeles boosters transformed the borderlands through urban and imperial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century and how the Mexican Revolution redefined those same capitalist networks into the twentieth.
Kim draws on archives in the United States and Mexico to argue that financial networks emerging from Los Angeles drove economic transformations in the borderlands, reshaped social relations across wide swaths of territory, and deployed racial hierarchies to advance investment projects across the border. However, the Mexican Revolution, with its implicit critique of imperialism, disrupted the networks of investment and exploitation that had structured the borderlands for sixty years, and reconfigured transnational systems of infrastructure and trade. Kim provides the first history to connect Los Angeles’s urban expansionism with more continental and global currents, and what results is a rich account of real and imagined geographies of city, race, and empire.Less
In this compelling narrative of capitalist development and revolutionary response, Jessica M. Kim reexamines the rise of Los Angeles from a small town to a global city against the backdrop of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Gilded Age economics, and American empire. It is a far-reaching transnational history, chronicling how Los Angeles boosters transformed the borderlands through urban and imperial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century and how the Mexican Revolution redefined those same capitalist networks into the twentieth.
Kim draws on archives in the United States and Mexico to argue that financial networks emerging from Los Angeles drove economic transformations in the borderlands, reshaped social relations across wide swaths of territory, and deployed racial hierarchies to advance investment projects across the border. However, the Mexican Revolution, with its implicit critique of imperialism, disrupted the networks of investment and exploitation that had structured the borderlands for sixty years, and reconfigured transnational systems of infrastructure and trade. Kim provides the first history to connect Los Angeles’s urban expansionism with more continental and global currents, and what results is a rich account of real and imagined geographies of city, race, and empire.
Swati Rana
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781469659473
- eISBN:
- 9781469659497
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469659473.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
A vexed figure inhabits U.S. literature and culture: the visibly racialized immigrant who disavows minority identity and embraces the American dream. Such figures are potent and controversial, for ...
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A vexed figure inhabits U.S. literature and culture: the visibly racialized immigrant who disavows minority identity and embraces the American dream. Such figures are potent and controversial, for they promise to expiate racial violence and perpetuate an exceptionalist ideal of America. Swati Rana grapples with these figures, building on studies of literary character and racial form. Rana offers a new way to view characterization through racialization that creates a fuller social reading of race. Situated in a nascent period of ethnic identification from 1900 to 1960, this book focuses on immigrant writers who do not fit neatly into a resistance-based model of ethnic literature. Writings by Paule Marshall, Ameen Rihani, Dalip Singh Saund, José Garcia Villa, and José Antonio Villarreal symbolize different aspects of the American dream, from individualism to imperialism, assimilation to upward mobility. The dynamics of characterization are also those of contestation, Rana argues. Analyzing the interrelation of persona and personhood, Race Characters presents an original method of comparison, revealing how the protagonist of the American dream is socially constrained and structurally driven.Less
A vexed figure inhabits U.S. literature and culture: the visibly racialized immigrant who disavows minority identity and embraces the American dream. Such figures are potent and controversial, for they promise to expiate racial violence and perpetuate an exceptionalist ideal of America. Swati Rana grapples with these figures, building on studies of literary character and racial form. Rana offers a new way to view characterization through racialization that creates a fuller social reading of race. Situated in a nascent period of ethnic identification from 1900 to 1960, this book focuses on immigrant writers who do not fit neatly into a resistance-based model of ethnic literature. Writings by Paule Marshall, Ameen Rihani, Dalip Singh Saund, José Garcia Villa, and José Antonio Villarreal symbolize different aspects of the American dream, from individualism to imperialism, assimilation to upward mobility. The dynamics of characterization are also those of contestation, Rana argues. Analyzing the interrelation of persona and personhood, Race Characters presents an original method of comparison, revealing how the protagonist of the American dream is socially constrained and structurally driven.
Christine Rosen
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780195156799
- eISBN:
- 9780199835218
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/019515679X.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This chapter continues the discussion of religious enthusiasts of eugenics by tracing the support the movement garnered from prominent Protestants such as Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis of Plymouth ...
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This chapter continues the discussion of religious enthusiasts of eugenics by tracing the support the movement garnered from prominent Protestants such as Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, who helped eugenics supporters such as Dr. John Harvey Kellogg organize the First and Second National Race Betterment Conferences in 1915 and 1916. At the same time, Reform rabbis such as Max Reichler began to assess the eugenics movement in light of the teachings of the Jewish faith at a time when fears about Jewish and Catholic immigration to the United States were rising; at the same time, a heated debate was occurring among Jews about the benefits and dangers of intermarriage. Finally, this chapter discusses how opponents of immigration, such as eugenicist Madison Grant, were employing eugenic rhetoric to argue that the American “melting pot” could no longer absorb new arrivals.Less
This chapter continues the discussion of religious enthusiasts of eugenics by tracing the support the movement garnered from prominent Protestants such as Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, who helped eugenics supporters such as Dr. John Harvey Kellogg organize the First and Second National Race Betterment Conferences in 1915 and 1916. At the same time, Reform rabbis such as Max Reichler began to assess the eugenics movement in light of the teachings of the Jewish faith at a time when fears about Jewish and Catholic immigration to the United States were rising; at the same time, a heated debate was occurring among Jews about the benefits and dangers of intermarriage. Finally, this chapter discusses how opponents of immigration, such as eugenicist Madison Grant, were employing eugenic rhetoric to argue that the American “melting pot” could no longer absorb new arrivals.
Brooke N. Newman
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780300225556
- eISBN:
- 9780300240979
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300225556.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History
Focusing on Jamaica, Britain’s most valuable colony in the Americas by the mid-eighteenth century, A Dark Inheritance explores the relationship between racial classifications and the inherited rights ...
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Focusing on Jamaica, Britain’s most valuable colony in the Americas by the mid-eighteenth century, A Dark Inheritance explores the relationship between racial classifications and the inherited rights and privileges associated with British subject status. Brooke Newman reveals the centrality of notions of blood and blood mixture to evolving racial definitions and sexual practices in colonial Jamaica and to legal and political debates over slavery and the rights of imperial subjects on both sides of the Atlantic. Weaving together a diverse range of sources, Newman shows how colonial racial ideologies rooted in fictions of blood ancestry at once justified permanent, hereditary slavery for Africans and barred members of certain marginalized groups from laying claim to British liberties on the basis of hereditary status. This groundbreaking study demonstrates that challenges to an Atlantic slave system underpinned by distinctions of blood had far-reaching consequences for British understandings of race, gender, and national belonging.Less
Focusing on Jamaica, Britain’s most valuable colony in the Americas by the mid-eighteenth century, A Dark Inheritance explores the relationship between racial classifications and the inherited rights and privileges associated with British subject status. Brooke Newman reveals the centrality of notions of blood and blood mixture to evolving racial definitions and sexual practices in colonial Jamaica and to legal and political debates over slavery and the rights of imperial subjects on both sides of the Atlantic. Weaving together a diverse range of sources, Newman shows how colonial racial ideologies rooted in fictions of blood ancestry at once justified permanent, hereditary slavery for Africans and barred members of certain marginalized groups from laying claim to British liberties on the basis of hereditary status. This groundbreaking study demonstrates that challenges to an Atlantic slave system underpinned by distinctions of blood had far-reaching consequences for British understandings of race, gender, and national belonging.
