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The dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion remains one of the most lasting racial formations from Reconstruction America. Black citizenship and suffrage neither mitigated racial inequality nor racially subordinated American identities, especially after Plessy v. Ferguson legalized racial segregation. The extension of nominal citizenship to black freedmen did not break the constitutive link between whiteness and citizenship, as the racial exclusion of Chinese (and later all so-called Asiatic races) from immigration and naturalization helped establish the whiteness or Americanization of new European immigrants. By the end of the century, the dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion had become an oft-referenced rhetorical figure in popular and legal discourses, structuring persuasive arguments both for and against Chinese political rights and black racial inequality. The introduction explores the cultural genealogies of this dialectical configuration linking together immigration and citizenship struggles in the long shadow of slavery and abolition.

This chapter examines the contemporary adaptation of vipassana meditation by convert Buddhists and sympathizers to the American context. It employs racial formation theory to distinguish between cultural and racial rearticulations of Buddhist ideas, beliefs, and practices. Cultural rearticulation is an ordinary means of taking Asian religious practices and rerepresent them in terms that are recognizable and meaningful for Americans in the mainstream culture. The incorporation of Western psychology into vipassana meditation and the demystification of Buddhist practices are two prime examples of cultural rearticulation of vipassana meditation. While these adaptations can be seen as inevitable products of the transmission of Buddhism in America, they can also be considered examples of racial rearticulation if they demonstrate the ways in which Burmese vipassana meditation has been rearticulated into specific but deliberately chosen forms that help preserve the prevailing system of racial hegemony and privileges surrounding whiteness.

This introduction describes the theory and method of racial worldmaking. Critiquing the dominant approach of racial formation theory for analyzing race in the humanities and social sciences, it distinguishes an approach based on racial salience - how, when, and where we notice race. It describes the interrelations among genre and race in terms of larger theories of worldbuilding. The archive of popular fiction from 1893 to the present is established and linked to major, overlooked modes of black and Asiatic racialization. This archive challenges prominent historical accounts of race and racism in the twentieth century.

This book explores a number of questions concerning race using racial formation theory as a point of departure. In their book Racial Formation in the United States, Michael Omi and Howard Winant provide a kind of political vocabulary and shared framework through which to analyze and locate the role of race in structuring broader social formations. This book is a collection of thirteen essays written by scholars in a wide range of fields to discuss issues ranging from slavery and land ownership to labor and social movements, torture and war, sexuality and gender formation, indigeneity, colonialism, and genetics. The essays put Omi and Winant in dialogue with various scholarly developments in critical race theory and address gaps in their framework, particularly in relation to gender, sexuality, and global racializations.

This chapter examines the origins of racial formation theory, the political context from which it emerged, and the key theoretical currents that influenced Racial Formation in the United States. It begins by situating racial formation theory in the historical period from which it first emerged and applying it to racial politics today in the age of Barack Obama. It then discusses the problems that racial formation theory was initially designed to address before turning to some contemporary analyses of changing U.S. racial dynamics and their implications, along with new patterns of race and racism, the ongoing instability and changing meaning of the race concept, and issues such as as “colorblind” racial ideology and the role of race in electoral politics. The chapter also explores various “post-racial scenarios” that the United States might confront in the near future, as well as the tensions and possibilities authorized by the crisis of colorblindness. Finally, it raises a number of questions, such as those relating to race consciousness and a racial justice-oriented social policy.

Our book concludes with an exploration of national politics, structural antagonisms, and racial justice via transnational, indigenous, and women of color feminist perspectives. It also puts the black/white racial binary that has animated the rest of the book into a broader racial perspective. Kirstie A. Dorr introduces a set of case studies that signal some of the thorny polemics that complicate and confound the pursuit of racial justice as a solely nation-based project. This chapter concludes that, in our current political moment, analyses of racial discourse and practice must contend with the ways in which racial formation processes are at once geo-historically specific—that is, as temporally emplaced in particular, local, regional, and national contexts—and geo-historically relational—that is, as situated within and articulated with other geographies of racial capitalist formation and networks of cultural circulation.

This chapter examines how sovereign violence defines the meanings and effects attached to race by bringing W. E. B. DuBois into conversation with Michael Omi and Howard Winant. It deploys racial formation theory alongside DuBois to conceptualize race as less “precipitated out of social relations” than “remade as social relation,” in order to expose race as reconstituted in the practices of permanent war and as deeply embedded in “the uniquely violent foundations of Western modernity.” It also deconstructs racist depictions of Barack Obama and highlights the complex and troubling contradictions that his presidency engenders, not only for a white hegemony founded on “post-racial” politics but also for sovereign violence legitimized under the global umbrella of the expanded U.S. national security state.

The introduction presents the book’s argument according to which it is more accurate to view eighteenth-century New Orleans as a Caribbean port city than as a North American one, as its late foundation, its position within the French Empire, and its connections with Saint-Domingue explain why the interplay of slavery and race profoundly shaped its society from the outset. It situates the book vis-à-vis Louisiana and Atlantic historiographies on urban slavery, slave societies, and racial formation, arguing that historians need to move away from a comparative history of racial slavery in the Western Hemisphere that contrasts the Caribbean and North America as two distinctive models. Finally, the introduction discusses how the book draws on two methodological approaches in order to analyze how racial formation unfolded under the influence of global, regional, and local circumstances: it practices a situated Atlantic history and develops a microhistory of race within the urban center.

Published in 1975, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora emerged amid the onset of post-civil rights era politics of black respectability and neoliberal ideology and policies that rendered black communities and bodies paradoxically more “public” and “private.” This essay posits Jones’s novel as a corrective to these ideological and existential binds. Thinking through psychoanalytic theories of mourning and melancholia, queer of color theories of identity formation, and the work of black feminist scholars, this essay explores how Jones draws on the blues aesthetic to fashion a novel that accounts for the process of racial subject formation at the intersections of buried social memory and ongoing practices of racialization and underscores the individualistic contours of racial identity without stabilizing hegemonic discourses of racial ideology.

This chapter examines issues of gender and sexuality within the context of Michael Omi and Howard Winant's theoretical framework. Drawing on the concept of intersectionality alongside racial formation theory, it discusses the unexplored opportunities in Racial Formation in the United States to theorize gender and race as mutually constitutive. It juxtaposes Racial Formation's profound effect on the field of ethnic studies with its relatively obscure place within women's and gender studies, with particular emphasis on why theories that address the historical production of race and gender have not adequately engaged with one another. The chapter also looks at the alleged gender deviance of black women on welfare and argues that race, gender, class, and sexuality are intrinsically conjoined.

This chapter examines how the end of affirmative action in California functions as a racial project. Using Michael Omi and Howard Winant's conceptualization of racial projects, it considers the ways that the principles of “race neutrality” and “race preferences” operate in debates over “anti-preference” initiatives like Proposition 209. It shows how reinterpretation of the meaning of race through veneration of colorblindness led to the redistribution of resources along racial lines. It demonstrates this process through an inventive analysis of hypothetical personal statements written by Barack Obama and Clarence Thomas in their law school applications, arguing that bans on the explicit use of race in law school admissions do not abolish but reorder racial preferences. The chapter also suggests that racial identity can be expressed in different ways and that racial formation occurs not only at the level of social or political structure, but also at the level of identity performance.

This chapter introduces the subject of the Chinese presence in Mexico through their distorted representation in a state museum. The history of Chinese Mexicans provides new ways to analyze the formation of mestizo national identity in Revolutionary Mexico. This chapter introduces the significance of the 1917 constitution by linking its legal definition of the government’s obligation to protect the population with the historical development of racial domination. The methodological approach of an Asian Americanist critique is explored to show why attention to the discursive and ideological construction of racialized Asian difference is important to conceptions of the Mexican national state. In showing the centrality of race in the Mexican governance, the chapter lays out a comparative racial formation approach that examines the role of anti-Chinese politics in the reformulation of citizenship, state power, and national identity after the 1910 revolution.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine the historical forces and contemporary practices that shape the terrain of struggle and the prevailing racial order within which Ghanaian urban communities and identities are constituted. It explains the significance of establishing the fact of the occurrence of racialization in purportedly unusual or unsuspecting places. It also provides an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter examines the complex logics and political forces underlying racial formation in early colonial Lima. It considers the theme of “racial democracy” and its associated racial projects of mestizaje, indigenismo, and contemporary multiculturalism in Latin America in order to highlight the constitutive nature of “race” itself in Iberian thought as reflected in the legal recognition of mestizo categories. It begins by historically situating the twentieth-century Latin American racial project of mestizaje and twenty-first-century multiculturalism within their origins in medieval hierarchies of blood mixing. It then discusses the tensions that surround comparative conversations about race and how ideas of blood purity were worked out in a slaveholding, colonial milieu in which extensive race mixing occurred. It also charts the development of categories of race and caste in seventeenth-century Lima as well as the cultural zoning of black (Afro-Latino) and indigenous (indio) that reemerged in the contemporary discourse of Latin American multiculturalism.

This chapter is concerned with the “Mexicanist presence” found in the narratives of silent moviemakers. It investigates the interweaving of racial formation processes in cinema in the history of nation building. It also analyzes how a group of films can contribute to a cultural memory of denial by focusing on events where Mexicana visibility figures prominently in questions of national identity. The chapter determines that the Western films set in the “frontier” best capture the anxieties of the nation about the Mexicanist presence.

This chapter discusses the role of sexuality and related gender practices in constructing racial boundaries in the United States. It describes the role of gender in the process of racial formation and the slave labor force, arguing that the male gender was placed marginally above the female on the social hierarchy of the slave community. This is followed by a discussion of the reconstruction of race and gender following the Civil War. The chapter also examines the role of sex and gender in racial subordination.

This chapter studies how the real work experiences of second-generation Caribbean young adults influence their views on the role of education in their lives. The first section discusses the segmented assimilation theory and racial formation theory. It also introduces the race–gender experience theory, which can be used to understand the racial(ized) and gender(ed) experiences of the second generation in modern U.S. society. The second section of the chapter looks at the work experiences of second-generation Caribbean men and women, and describes this against the backdrop of a changing New York economy. The chapter references the life histories of the second generation, which reveal that men and women had rather different experiences in the labor market, which led to significant changes in their views about education.