This book explains theoretical work in postcolonial and postsocialist studies to offer a novel and distinctive insight into how Yugoslavia is configured by, and through, race. It presents the history of how ideas of racialised difference have been translated globally in Yugoslavia. The book provides a discussion on the critical race scholarship, global historical sociologies of 'race in translation' and south-east European cultural critique to show that the Yugoslav region is deeply embedded in global formations of race. It considers the geopolitical imagination of popular culture; the history of ethnicity; and transnational formations of race before and during state socialism, including the Non-Aligned Movement. The book also considers the post-Yugoslav discourses of security, migration, terrorism and international intervention, including the War on Terror and the refugee crisis. It elaborates how often-neglected aspects of the history of nationhood and migration reveal connections that tie the region into the global history of race. The book also explains the linkage between ethnic exclusivism and territory in the ethnopolitical logic of the Bosnian conflict and in the internationally mediated peace agreements that enshrined it: 'apartheid cartography'. Race and whiteness remained perceptible in post-war Bosnian identity discourses as new, open-ended forms of post-conflict international intervention developed.
chapter7 21/12/04 11:19 am Page 127 7 Theorising race, racism and culture: David Lloyd’s work My focus here is an important and influential article by postcolonial scholar David Lloyd, ‘Race Under Representation’, published in the 1991 ‘Neo-Colonialism’ issue of Oxford Literary Review.1 Lloyd sets out to explain ‘how the meshing of racial formations can take place between various levels and spheres of social practice, as, for example, between political and cultural spheres or between the individual and the national level’ (p. 63). A central argument of his
In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin argues that the American dream is far from being a reality in part because there is much Americans do not wish to know about themselves. Given the current political climate in the United States, this idea seems just as timely as it did in the 1960s. Baldwin’s politics and thinking about race and religion are informed by an optimistic belief in the human capacity to love and change for the better, in contrast with Ta-Nehisi Coates, the heir apparent to Baldwin’s legacy. Considering current events, it seems particularly useful to turn back to The Fire Next Time. Not only does Baldwin provide a foundation for understanding racism in the United States, but more importantly, he provides some much-needed hope and guidance for the future. Baldwin discusses democracy as an act that must be realized, in part by coming to a greater understanding of race and religion as performative acts that have political consequences for all Americans. In this article, I examine the influence of pragmatism on Baldwin’s understanding of race and religion. By encouraging readers to acknowledge race and religion as political constructs, Baldwin highlights the inseparability of theory and practice that is a hallmark of both pragmatism and the realization of a democratic society. Furthermore, I argue that Baldwin’s politics provide a more useful framework than Coates’s for this particular historical moment because of Baldwin’s emphasis on change and evolving democracy.
Race Talk is about racism and multilingual communication. The book draws on original, ethnographic research conducted on heterogeneous and multiethnic street markets in Napoli, southern Italy, in 2012. Here, Neapolitan street vendors worked alongside migrants from Senegal, Nigeria, Bangladesh and China as part of an ambivalent, cooperative and unequal quest to survive and prosper. A heteroglossia of different kinds of talk revealed the relations of domination and subordination between people. It showed how racialised hierarchies were enforced, as well as how ambivalent and novel transcultural solidarities emerged in everyday interaction. Street markets in Napoli provided important economic possibilities for both those born in the city, and those who had arrived more recently. However, anti-immigration politics, austerity and urban regeneration projects increasingly limited people’s ability to make a living in this way. In response, the street vendors organised politically. Their collective action was underpinned by an antihegemonic, multilingual talk through which they spoke back to power. Since that time, racism has surged in Napoli, and across the world, whilst human movement has continued unabated, because of worsening political, economic and environmental conditions. The book suggests that the edginess of multilingual talk – amongst people diversified in terms of race, legal status, religion and language, but united by an understanding of their potential disposability – offers useful insights into the kinds of imaginaries that will be needed to overcome the politics of borders and nationalism.
Williams and the Nobel prizewinner, W. Arthur Lewis. 2 But there are many more less well-known figures who contributed to the intellectual life of the Caribbean consistently to challenge prevailing views of race and empire: J. J. Thomas whose brief book Froudacity criticised the prejudices of the eminent English historian James Froude; Samuel Jules Celestine Edwards from Dominica, dead at an early age while editing
4 Postsocialism, borders, security and race after Yugoslavia The historical legacies shown in the last chapter do much to explain the contradictory racialised imaginaries of the Yugoslav region's ‘cultural archive’ ( Chapter 1 ) and the shifting nature of translations of race into discourses of ethnic and national belonging ( Chapter 2 ). Though many past applications of postcolonial thought to south-east Europe have bracketed race away, identifications with racialised narratives of Europeanness predated state socialism, yet alone the collapse
3 Transnational formations of race before and during Yugoslav state socialism In domains from the history of popular entertainment to that of ethnicity and migration, ideas of race, as well as ethnicity and religion, have demonstrably formed part of how people from the Yugoslav region have understood their place in Europe and the world. The region's history during, and after, the era of direct European colonialism differed from the USA's, France's or Brazil's; but this did not exclude it from the networks of ‘race in translation’ (Stam and
opportunity for economic development and a means of renewal for a British race polluted by industrial urbanization, all of which would serve to strengthen the Empire. 9 As Stephen Constantine so neatly sums it up: The claimed benefits of female migration were therefore essentially conservative: the confirmation of women’s traditional roles and the
6 Viola Bernard and the case study of race in post-war America Joy Damousi The writings and political activism of Viola Bernard, a psychoanalyst of German-Jewish background who practised in New York during the twentieth century, provide a further prism through which to consider the genre of the case study, as well as broader questions concerning intersections between culture, politics and the discourses of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. A resilient political and social activist, Bernard was committed to many progressive causes. These included support of trade
I am… a social leper, a race outcast from an outcast class . (Claude McKay, 1921) The road to London I’ve a longin’ in me dept’s of heart dat I can conquer not, ’Tis a wish dat I’ve have been havin’ from since I could form a t’o’t, ’Tis to sail athwart the ocean