Canadian Social Studies

Feminist Formations , 2014

The article reveals how particular mass-mediated journalistic discourses of white middle-class “respectability” are normalized and rendered invisible by dominant media institutions. It explores how Canadian mainstream journalism not only interprets reality in ways that reflect reactionary ideologies and prevailing views of “common sense,” but is responsible for constructing that reality. This reality also reflects how Canadian productions of gendered racial citizenship and white supremacy are currently being reconstituted and revivified by the neoliberal “anti-state state,” and are fueling the discursive and physical violence that drives “necropolitics.” The article engages in a frame analysis of news coverage of two high-profile criminal cases that are cited as the cause célèbre legitimizing the passage of The Citizen’s Arrest and Self-defence Act, and engage with the interventions of critical race feminism and postcolonial theory, which are attentive to how gender and race thinking are co-imbricated in necropolitical forms of power within white settler societies. Since the dualist “construct of respectability and degeneracy” determines who possesses the rightful claim to citizenship and who is excluded from belonging to the nation, it remains important in uncovering interlocking structures of domination.

2017

Critical Sociology, 2015

In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (NACCD) to examine the 1967 race riots that were taking place in Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark, and Detroit that erupted in the mid-1960s. That report, officially labeled the Kerner Report, outlined structural inequalities in America that privileged whites over other racial and ethnic groups; the report concluded that the United States was headed toward two separate and unequal societies: black and white. Forty-seven years after the Kerner Report where do we stand? In this article, I revisit recent events on police violence toward minorities and give consideration to some thoughts moving forward.

2018

The Democratic Arts of Mourning: Political Theory and Loss, 2019

In recent years, a wide range of political theorists have turned to mourning (" the funeral ") as a response to loss that can further the work of democratic repair within progressive social and political movements. Drawing on the #BlackLivesMatter movement's critique of contemporary white supremacy and the carceral state as a starting point, I argue that the turn to mourning tends to foreground what I call " exceptional mourning, " which has three core pitfalls: 1) It risks pathologizing forms of " antagonistic politics " driven by anger and disruption ("the riot "). 2) It rests on assumptions about white moral psychology that drive unduly optimistic expectations about what mourning can do to transform persistent hierarchies. 3) It inadvertently downplays questions of hierarchy and division confronted through widely varying accounts of anti-racist political action within the Black radical tradition and haunted today by the legacy of respectability politics. To illustrate these three claims, I turn to Martin Luther King's, Jr., whose politics might be read through the lens of mourning if not for his own transformation. While the early King's political rhetoric and practice can be read through a lens of "prophetic mourning " that aims to transform unmerited suffering into democratic repair, I argue that King began to question the underlying assumptions of a politics of mourning around 1963. King's post-1963 rhetoric and practice surprisingly aimed to effect change in dynamic reciprocity with a more openly antagonistic politics embodied in the riot, effectively drawing on the threat that the Black riot represented to Northern liberal elites in order to confront the latter with a choice between the " good " militancy of nonviolence and the " bad " militancy of riots. In closing, I argue that King's shift suggests that the current turn to mourning can be supplemented with more sustained reflections on a) the strategic interplay between different forms of militancy and b) the viability of an antagonistic politics of disruption within movements that refuse respectability politics. I conclude by suggesting that a greater focus on reception as opposed solely to the practices of the marginalized themselves might better inform an engagement between mourning and other registers of anti-racist politics.

Current Anthropology , 2018

This paper examines the use by those living in impoverished neighborhoods of color in Syracuse, NY, of artifacts and rituals of memorialization in response to intense ongoing violence. This work is part of a longitudinal, community- university action anthropology collaboration on trauma due to neighborhood violence. This Rust Belt city of 145,000 res- idents had 30 murders in 2016, the highest murder rate in New York State and one of the highest nationwide. Since at least 2009, the majority of Syracuse’s homicides resulted from neighborhood violence in which adolescent and young adult members from competing turf areas carry out ongoing feuds. Neighbors, coworkers, family members, and friends of mur- der victims face trauma, including emotional and somatic symptoms. There is little public recognition of the deep pain and grief experienced by community members. In response, community memorialization takes place through a process of acknowledging key events with symbols, folk art, martyrdom, and language. These artifacts express shared values, even when those values are contrary to and in resistance to values of the larger society. We compare these practices to those seen in civil conflict areas to suggest that such memorialization may unfortunately fuel ongoing violence through processes of social contagion.

Journal of Canadian Studies, 2020

This article argues that media coverage of the 2010-17 Toronto gay village homicides avoids one of the central patterns in the case: the murderous aggression of a white gay man, Bruce McArthur, against racialized men, most of them from the Middle East or South Asia. It argues that even coverage that is sensitive to intersectionality tends to treat race, class, and immigration status as secondary to sexual orientation, making racialized queer migrants a "sub-group" of a normatively white lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer community. The article calls for sustained engagement with the specific, racialized character of much of the violence in the McArthur case. With inspiration from queer diasporic, transnational feminist, and feminist geographical methods, it points to continuities between McArthur's racialized violence and the effects of Canadian white supremacy, imperialism, and capitalist inequality on Afghan and Sri Lankan refugees across diasporas. These effects notably include Canada's 2002-14 role in the occupation of Afghanistan and the 2010 de-tainment of Sri Lankan Tamil passengers on the MV Sun Sea. The article concludes that critical reckoning with racialized violence as racialized violence is crucial to any hope of reparation in the wake of the McArthur case.

The Royal Asiatic Society & Edinburgh University Press, 2024

The capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman armies of Mehmed II in 1453 was a cataclysmic event that reverberated throughout Renaissance Europe. This event intensified the exodus of Byzantines to Italy and beyond and they brought along with them the heritage of Greek antiquity. Laonikos Chalkokondyles contributed to the Renaissance with his detailed application of Herodotos to the fifteenth century, Apodeixis Historion, and made sense of the rise of the Ottomans with the lens of ancient history. The Apodeixis was printed in Latin, French, and Greek and was widely successful. The historian restored Herodotean categories of ethnicity, political rule, language, and geography to make sense of contemporary events and peoples. This was a thorough study of ancient historiography and Laonikos thus parted ways with previous Byzantine historians. I refer to Laonikos’ method as “revolutionary classicizing”, to describe the ways in which he abandoned the ideal of lawful imperium and restored the model of oriental tyranny when he described the nascent Ottoman state. What appears to be emulation of the ancient classics was radical revival of political concepts such as city-states as ethnic units, freedom defined as independence from foreign rule, law-giving as fundamental aspect of Hellenic tradition which did not encompass the Christian period. Laonikos has often been studied in the context of proto-nationalist historiography as he had composed a universal history, wherein he had related extensive information on various ethnic and political units in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. However, such proto-nationalist application does not fully capture Laonikos’classicizing interests. Laonikos referred to his contemporaries as Hellenes, not because he was a nationalist who defined political identity only by recourse to language and common history. Rather, Laonikos believed that Hellenic identity, both referring to paganism as well as ethnicity, was relevant and not bankrupt. Importantly, we introduce manuscripts that have not yet been utilized to argue that Hellenism as paganism was living reality for Laonikos, his Platonist teacher Plethon, and their circle of intellectuals in the fifteenth century.

Ciencias Sociales y Educación, 2015

Si hay alguna verdad que aparece claramente cuando se toma una vision desenvuelta de la historia de la humanidad, es esta: los colectivos humanos son maquinas de fabricar dioses. ?Por que ha sido asi? ?Como funciona eso? Estas preguntas deberian estar en el corazon de las ciencias del hombre y de la sociedad, y ello tanto mas cuanto que se piensan laicas. No es asi. Es como si la terca determinacion que pone el espiritu positivo para deshacerse de todo que podria parecerse a un resto de pensamiento religioso se transmitiera a la eleccion de los objetos que juzga dignos de ser estudiados. Segun el, el punto de vista religioso sobre el mundo es una aberracion superada en la actualidad. Y equivocadamente concluye que no hay gran cosa que esperar de una ciencia de lo religioso.