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Assia Djebar's contribution to the assessment of Algeria as a multilingual space. Djebar's "writing for the trace" inscribes a dual resistance to colonial appropriations, but also to claims of authentic self-recovery after independence. Focusing on scenes of vanishing inscriptions or writing under erasure, Djebar presents an Algerian site that is produced poetically or in fragments.

Centered on the work of contemporary experimental poet and critic Erica Hunt, this chapter argues that the author’s chapbook Piece Logic (2002) offers an implicit critique of postwar liberal antiracist ideals of racial progress understood primarily in terms of desegregated national inclusion within what Roland Marchand has called a “democracy of goods.” In this chapbook, Hunt explores how relations between subjects within and beyond the boundaries of the United States have been reshaped by an increasingly comprehensive system of differential economic valuation that redefines the meaning of racial difference, citizenship, family, and the material limits of formal equality. Hunt’s collection draws attention to how postwar processes of racial group formation are shaped by what Karl Marx calls “the fetishism of the commodity”, in which the life cycle of disposable objects mirrors the fate of racialized disposable or “surplus” populations. The devaluation and destruction of commodities, the chapter maintains, reflect a postwar racial order in which blackness comes to signify a limit case of relative expendability and the “broken” underside of postwar dreams of limitless consumer abundance.

The conclusion of Testing Fate ties together the themes of the book and extends the argument of Chapter 5 by making the point that the “unfreedom” to fulfill one’s genetic responsibilities derives not only from the phenomenon of geneticization, but also from the paradox of ascribing agency to the Other. Biocitizenship is as much about responsibilization and the individual’s right to be unfree as it is about belonging; so long as some individuals’ freedoms are constrained by their cultural exclusion as the Other, or even where the freedom of some is contingent upon that exclusion, unconstrained agency, i.e., truly free choice, genetic decision-making is impossible.

This chapter explores the representations of black masculinity in two novels, Percival Everett’s Erasure and Adam Mansbach’s Angry Black White Boy. By reading these particular texts side by side, this chapter demonstrates that even in the absence of signifiers, the stereotype of the black male criminal is pervasive. Similarly, this chapter explores how Mansbach makes whiteness visible, highlighting its attendant racialization and unspoken privilege.

In September 2009 the radio station LMFM hosted a live debate on racial tensions in the taxi industry in Drogheda. Allegations were made about African-born drivers operating unlicensed taxis and failing to use photo IDs – according to one commentator, ‘They all look much the same to the general public’. This chapter takes this incident as a starting point from which to explore the ways in which the taxi industry has become a key a site of racialization and labour integration in Ireland. The chapter discusses migrant drivers’ hopes for upward social mobility but also attends to their everyday experiences of racism and discrimination in an industry characterized by government at a distance, liberalization, and extraordinary work pressures. The chapter also pays particular attention to the role of rumours within the local cultural landscape.

What is everyday life like for the second-generation African-Irish youth? This chapter begins with an ethnographic account of an African beauty pageant in Ireland and shows the complex interactions between generations across gendered and cultural lines. This chapter teases out the lived experiences of parenting and of growing up in African-Irish families – from parents’ hopes and fears for their children to young Nigerian and Congolese children's expressions of identity, difference and conformity.

This chapter explores how “race” is both constructed and performed, the ways in which some of these performances have been naturalized, and the degree to which, as such, “race” can be reformulated from ethnic or cultural points of view. The purpose of doing so is to show that the degree of agency and autonomy that both “black” and “white” subjects can achieve in a racialized society is a function of the systems and structures that invigilate racial stratification. The chapter goes on to show that what constitutes networks of belonging through culture and kinship can be differentially engaged in ways that break away from the naturalization of race as a means of separation and agglomeration. In other words, new ways of assembling human beings can emerge that run counter to already racialized societal systems. Texts examined include works by Adrian Piper, Jeff Koons, Octavia Butler, and Pamela Gien.

The fourth chapter examines discourses of post-identity, race/ethnicity, and intersections with gender and class in terms of the historical context of immigration as represented in 21^st century family history TV and its reception. Representations of major immigrant groups and relevant policies, controversies, and oversights are critiqued, with the portrayal of the Italian-American migration story epitomizing crucial lapses in the media treatments as determined based on the author’s genealogical journey to learn about and contextualize her own ethnicity and ancestral history and origins.

Chapter Five interrogates genetic ancestry texts and practices in terms of genealogy television portrayals and other traditional media treatments in such media as books and documentaries. It assesses issues related to race/ethnicity and their intersected identities, hybridity, definitions of kinship, and racism and racialization. It also considers the unique “brick walls” facing descendants of slaves in tracing their genealogy, and how and genetic ancestry operates in these circumstances.

Chapter Six explores digital media’s role in genetic ancestry discourses in terms of issues related to race/ethnicity and their intersected identities, hybridity, definitions of kinship, and racism and racialization. It addresses the rhetoric of testing service providers, YouTube videos, and the virtual interplay of participants. The author’s auto-ethnographic experiences with genetic ancestry are also provided, helping to reveal how connections can be made with genetic kin through social media, and how testing providers participate in the construction of racial categories as they present “ethnic ancestry” results to patrons.

Chapter 6 examines Filipinas marriage immigrants’ diverse paths of incorporation to the Korean rural community. The chapter aims to shift our attention from Filipinas’ struggles to adapt as newcomers to the dynamic process through which marriage immigrants are incorporated into the society over time. In the first part, two Filipinas’ stories show how model marriage immigrants have been incorporated into their marital families and communities, and in turn, how they have transformed these communities. The second part focuses on class-based and racial mistreatments that Filipinas experience and delves into a key issue that has yet to be fully discussed: namely the racialization of Southeast Asians.

This essay examines the migration of Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans to Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, long before the more widely recognized post-1965 immigration to the U.S. from Latin America. It argues that this pre-1965 migration to the Midwest was significant and played a critical role in establishing communities that would receive later migrants. In fact, by 1970, the city of Chicago officially counted nearly a quarter of a million Hispanics or Latinos in that year’s census. The essay examines how these populations became racialized as “non-white” in employment, housing, and the local enforcement and perceptions surrounding immigration policy.

This chapter introduces exclusionary cosmopolitanism as a theoretical framework for approaching transnational Peruvian identities. Within transnational Peruvian and more specifically limeño spaces cosmopolitan belonging is often shaped by existing hierarchies: some migrants belong, others are denied inclusion by middle and upper- class limeños. The chapter examines racialization and racial hierarchies in Peru, particularly in Lima, and the construction and treatment of indigenous internal migrants as the historically inferior other for middle and upper-class limeños. It brings into the discussion of cosmopolitan belonging how processes of racialization and othering also impact and are reinforced by international migrants, who had previously considered themselves to be part of the unmarked privileged middle and upper- classes.

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed the emergence of a media and scholarly panic in Brazil over an alleged racialization of the citizenry. As affirmative action, multiculturalism, and race-based law have become institutionalized parts of Brazilian governance, critics warn that new forms of (violent) racialization of the populace will follow. Chapter 5 examines this racialization thesis by examining the relationship between the quilombo rights grounded in Brazil’s 1988 constitution and the racialization of political consciousness in Alcântara. Against scholarly critics of race-based policies, the chapter shows how social struggles have racialized the law, not, principally, the other way around. New laws, such as the quilombo rights in Brazil’s 1998 constitution have, however, opened a space for social movements to reassess existing racial forms. The chapter also examines how real ambiguity of forms of ethnoracial identification in Alcântara accounts for some divergent perspectives about quilombos among some of the quilombola allies in social movements and universities.

This chapter presents the ways in which understandings of ethnicity and race have evolved, and what characterises the different perspectives on these social positions that are available (i.e. essentialism/ primordialism, structuralism/ circumstantialism and constructionism). In doing so, this chapter maps out what these different perspectives mean to how we make sense of the impact that ethnicity and race have in our lives, and explains why some scholars refer to ethnicity and race as background variables, while others regard them as social positions, locations or identification grounds. In doing so this chapter problematizes what previous research on the intersection of ethnicity/ race and ageing/ old age has shown as far as the understandings of ethnicity and race that inform this scholarship.

The introduction of Testing Fate situates the book in terms of the growing tendency within medicine to frame disease in “racial” terms, and the consequent need to explore genetic disease concepts historically and critically. It also provides an overview of the history of Tay-Sachs since its first diagnosis in 1881, including the development of community-based carrier screening in the 1970s. An overview of each chapter and the overall argument is also provided.

The first chapter looks at the initial construction of Tay-Sachs as a Jewish disease in the context of anti-immigrationism in the early decades of the 1900s to demonstrate how medical racialism both contributed to the passing of restrictive immigration legislation in the US and helped lay the groundwork for genetic responsibilization later on.