Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies Research Papers

This outline of the theoretical and historical parameters of my recently published Famine Irish and the American Racial State synthesizes the work of Nicos Poulantzas, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, and David Theo Goldberg, among... more

This essay argues that the science fiction classic disguises its use of race, signifying blackness indirectly through metaphor rather than directly through bodies that conform to traditional notions of biological race.

IMPERIAL INJURIES (under contract with Temple University Press) offers an alternative genealogy, archive, and approach to the study of racialized health disparities through literary and cultural studies analysis. Reading works of... more

IMPERIAL INJURIES (under contract with Temple University Press) offers an alternative genealogy, archive, and approach to the study of racialized health disparities through literary and cultural studies analysis. Reading works of literature alongside legal, public health, sociological, and scientific texts from the late 19th century through the middle of the 20th, I argue that a host of authors, ranging from the anonymous poets detained at Angel Island to novelist Ann Petry to memoirist Nagai Takashi, harnessed the imaginative and interpretive possibilities of literature to tell a different story about race and health from the ones that many “race” scientists, public health officials, medical doctors, and even some civil rights leaders told during this time period. Dominant scientific, medical, and public health discourses defined Whiteness in terms of physical and mental “fitness” and blamed non-White communities for illness and disability on the basis of “inferior” heredity or cultural practices and lifeways deemed “deviant,” “immoral,” “irresponsible,” and “ignorant.” In contrast, the writers in this study portray disability and debilitation as embodied effects of racial capitalism and US imperialism—which I call imperial injuries—resulting from labor exploitation, crowded and unsafe housing, exposure to environmental toxins, warfare, biomedical abuse, and lack of access to nourishing food and respectful and effective health care. Thus, these narratives collectively inspire me to propose a theory of imperial injury that recognizes disablement and debilitation as specific forms of violence that reinforce US White supremacy, settler colonialism, and imperialism. In order to support and develop this theory of imperial injury, the book takes a comparative and a transnational approach, examining the wide-ranging effects of such disabling and debilitating violence across different racialized groups, in different historical moments and locations of US empire.

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- by Amanda Martinez Morrison
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- 13
  Chicano Studies, Popular Culture, Subcultures, Hip-Hop/Rap

This article focuses on the Nazi perception and exploitation of American lynching in the prewar Third Reich. It explores how National Socialist policymakers and writers addressed violence within their own society by exploring racial... more

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- by Jonathan Wiesen
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- 15
  Violence, German History, Transatlantic History, Southern History

In this essay, we elaborate on the ways in which colonial unknowing is always itself a response, an epistemological counter-formation, which takes shape in reaction to the lived relations and incommensurable knowledges it seeks to render... more

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- by Alyosha Goldstein
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- 80
  Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Social Theory, Geography

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- by Alyosha Goldstein
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- 67
  Critical Theory, History, American History, Cultural Studies

This essay discusses typical male behavioural patterns based on a 2020 news event that involved the consumption of nonconsensual pornography via Telegram (an end-to-end encrypted instant messaging app). The authors provide a brief... more

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- by Ron J Backus and +1
  Ron J Backus
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- 8
  Gender Studies, Women's Studies, Political Science, Feminism

This essay is a reflection on coming to terms with the category ‘tribal’ through a decade and a half of researching the Northeast. As a non-historian who has worked on issues as diverse as agricultural change, pro-development groups,... more

This essay is a reflection on coming to terms with the category ‘tribal’ through a decade and a half of researching the Northeast. As a non-historian who has worked on issues as diverse as agricultural change, pro-development groups, Northeast migrants, race and the media, and inter-ethnic relations in urban India, I come to this essay from a position of puzzlement: What am I supposed to do with the category ‘tribal’? Challenge it? Adopt it? Stand up for it? Further, what are ‘we’, as scholars engaged with the Northeast professionally and personally, to do with the category? On the one hand, scholars are finely attuned to the category as a thin colonial construction, and scarcely a seminar or special issue goes by without a call to challenge the category, deconstruct it, rethink it, or lay bare its precarious assumptions. On the other hand, the category is used by those subject to it, is desired by those who do not have it, and is resolute in a great deal of scholarship on the region as evidence for an ongoing ‘identity crisis’ that offers a ready-made logic for almost everything. As many authors have pointed out, including many in this volume, communities of the region, particularly in the hill areas, are largely de-historicized in this process: history is for the valleys, anthropology for the hills. As such, the past is told as a series of recent encounters: communities in the region emerged out of primitive pasts through contact with colonial authorities and missionaries, were categorized and subject to forms of colonial subjugation which dramatically altered their previously unchanging lives, and were then forced to survive in the modern Indian state. Recent scholarship has posed a major challenge to these standard practices of understanding the region. Despite these welcome shifts, I still find the category challenging, particularly as much of my academic life has required me to explain ‘tribal’ for audiences outside the Northeast, and often outside South Asia entirely. Further, having used race as a way of analysing the politics of integration, solidarity, and representation for Northeast communities in India, I have noted a fascinating reaction from scholars anxious about the use of race lest it transgress the tribal/non-tribal distinction in the region. This has called for a careful retelling of a particular historical narrative by scholars and by activists and politicians. In this paper, I explore the resoluteness of the category ‘tribal’, and some alternative ways of approaching it, by using the example of Meghalaya. Although I have conducted little research in Meghalaya since 2010 as my focus has shifted to other parts of the region, Meghalaya was the first place I went as a researcher. I spent almost a decade researching here – almost all of it in the Khasi Hills – including all my doctoral work. Thus, it was – and remains – the setting where I have struggled most with the category of ‘tribal’: its past, its legacy, and what I am to make of it. Though this, I suggest, holds true for other contexts in the Northeast too.

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- by Duncan McDuie-Ra
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- 15
  Race and Ethnicity, Colonialism, Nagaland, Northeast India

Abstract: Through ethnography, I examine how hip-hop's expressive forms are being used as the raw materials of everyday life by residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, home to what many regard as one of the most stylistically... more

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- by Amanda Martinez Morrison
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- 14
  Geography, Chicano Studies, Popular Culture, Subcultures

In 2009, just prior to her death, Argentine revolutionary folk singer Mercedes Sosa chose to give concerts in Israel. These appearances were consistent with her increasingly public Zionism, staged through singing Israeli nationalist songs... more

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- by Tamara Lea Spira
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- 20
  Latin American Studies, American Studies, Feminist Theory, Palestine

Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner, introduction to Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

Hugo Grotius, “On the Origin of the Native Races of America. A Dissertation”, en Bibliotheca Curiosa. Traducida del original latino y enriquecida con notas bibliográficas e ilustraciones por Edmund Goldsmid F. R. H. S. (Edimburgo:... more

In social terms Arab American Christians lie both inside and outside the category of ‘white’ by race. Seemingly ‘white’ via their religious affiliation with the majority and non-white through their Arab and Middle Eastern backgrounds, at... more

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- by Tamara Lea Spira and +1
  Anna M. Agathangelou
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- 10
  Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Critical Race Studies

The Korean Wave has given Korean popular culture and its products multinational audiences and consumer fanbases. It is no longer uncommon to see fans of all genders, nationalities, and racial and ethnic backgrounds participating in the... more

Illuminating how biomedical capital invests in white and Asian American populations while divesting from Black surplus populations, this article proposes recent Asian American dystopian fiction provides a case study for analyzing... more

Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946-) and Mab Segrest (1949-) are white middle-class lesbians that both came of age during the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement in rural Alabama. Today, they are considered influential figures in feminist... more

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- by Amanda Mixon
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- 19
  Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Women's Studies, Feminist Theory

This is a review of my book, Confronting Affirmative Action in Brazil, which was published in the March 2019 issue of the American Journal of Sociology.

This article juxtaposes two very different authors from very different locations: George Winston, a largely forgotten Southern college president during the Jim Crow era in the United States, and Gilberto Freyre, arguably Brazil’s most... more

Nationalism and its counterpart, modernism, are projects that involve the attempt to homogenize and incorporate the masses through the creation of a majority identity that usually leads to the classification of certain deviant groups as... more

This essay shows how the white-black binary determines the representation of the Asian in post-WWII Hollywood film.

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- by Tamara Lea Spira
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- 9
  Feminist Theory, Critical Race Studies, Queer Theory, Sexual Violence

This essay offers a reading of what could be called a metrological imaginary at work in the writing of Korean American experimental poet Myung Mi Kim and in particular in Kim’s third book, Dura. In Dura, Kim traces a jagged itinerary... more

This is a chapter in Black Liberation and Palestine Solidarity (2013), a collection of selected essays by Lenni Brenner and Matthew Quest. This essay was written by Matthew Quest in 2013 for this collection. It anticipates many unexamined... more

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This essay explores how The Tonight Show’s white and black duo (the white host Jay Leno and the black bandleader Branford Marsalis, and later, Kevin Eubanks) determines the representation of an Asian (Judge Lance Ito). "Our national... more

Proposal for forthcoming edited book [forthcoming]

Intersectionalities/Interconnections/Liminalities CALL FOR PAPERS FOR THE 33rd ANNUAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE IN THE HUMANITIES The Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, the College of Arts and Humanities, and the... more

Intersectionalities/Interconnections/Liminalities

CALL FOR PAPERS FOR THE 33rd ANNUAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE IN THE HUMANITIES
The Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, the College of Arts and Humanities, and the University of West Georgia (UWG) invite you to celebrate the 33nd Annual Interdisciplinary Conference in the Humanities, October 25-27, 2018. We welcome submissions from across the Humanities, Fine Arts, and the Social and Natural Sciences, dealing with INTERSECTIONALITIES/INTERCONNECTIONS/LIMINALITIES and the many relations and intersections between them. Papers, exhibits, performances and screenings may be submitted by scholars, graduate students, writers, artists, and performers.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Juanamaría Cordones-Cook
Professor Juanamaría Cordones-Cook is the University of Missouri Curators’ Distinguished Professor, the Catherine Paine Middlebush Professor of Romance Languages and a member of the Academy of Letters of Uruguay. Her scholarship includes contemporary Spanish American literature, theater, and visual arts with a focus on Afro-Hispanic writers and artists. Along with an extensive publication record of journal articles and award-winning books, Cordones-Cook’s research also incorporates image, sound, and movement, having produced and directed oral histories and documentaries. An Emmy nominated filmmaker, Professor Cordones-Cook has built a panoramic compendium and archive of Havana’s Black Renaissance with over twenty documentaries on artists and writers of the African Diaspora with emphasis on Cuba.

We encourage presentations about Intersectionalities/Interconnections/Liminalities on topics including, but not limited to:

• Africana and Indigenous Studies
• Literary studies of all periods, places, and times
• African, Maghrib and Saharan Studies
• Haitian studies
• Filmography
• Afro-Hispanic Studies
• Opposing concepts such as: war/peace; love/hate; local/global; citizens/immigrants; etc.
• Gender and Sexuality Studies
• Imperialism and the Natural Sciences
• Cultural studies
• Migration, immigration and globalization
• Feminism, queer and postcolonial theory
• Linguistics, language and bilingualism
• Eco-criticism
• Memory, memorials, and commemoration
• Study abroad
• Anthropology
• Geography and cartography
• History, historiography, and historical revisions
• The visual arts, including film studies, photography and graphic design
• Environmental Studies and Urban Studies
• Health and travel concerns
• Theatre, scenes and landscapes
• Philosophy
• Myths and mythology
• Music, including musical history and theory
• Economics, including commerce, marketing and trade

We especially welcome presentations about Haitian Studies to honor Dr. Flore Zephir. Dr. Albert Valdman, Director of the IU Creole Institute, will participate in this important recognition.

For individual proposals please submit a one-page, double-spaced abstract to Dr. Ana Zapata-Calle at azapata@westga.edu. Include the presenter’s name, institution, email address, phone number, and any audio-visual or technical requirements for the presentation on a separate page. Papers in French, German and Spanish are welcomed as part of a pre-organized panel.
Submissions for panels of 3-4 presenters are especially welcome. For panel proposals please submit the panel title, abstracts, and contact information for all speakers and for the panel moderator. Proposals are due by May 15th, 2018.

Organizing committee:
Dr. Ana Zapata-Calle (University of West Georgia)
Dr. Tomaz Cunningham (Jackson State University)
Dr. Kyle Lawton (University of West Georgia)

2018 registration fees:
• All UWG faculty and All graduate students: $65
• Faculty, scholars, and other participants: $110

https://www.westga.edu/academics/coah/foreign-languages-and-literatures/31_conference.php

Social mothering − women’s carework in the public sphere − played an important role in whites’ responses to racial minorities’ claims to middle-class mobility and identity in the late nineteenth century. In New Orleans and San Francisco,... more

Husbandry and the invention of race before Buffon. Thomas Jefferson, sheep and horse breeding and race (white, black, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon comparative legal history of race in the Americas blanqueamiento/whitening in the Americas,... more

This article probes a long‐overlooked concept in modern China—ethnic indigeneity—to propose new ways of looking at the relationship between the Chinese nation and its multiethnic minority groups. The Western scholarly community has long... more

Сравнительное мультипультиэтническое иследование между этим, тем и, я извиняюсь, третьим.

The link leads to the syllabus for a course that I taught at Haverford College in Spring 2018: "Does the West Exist? Comparative and Transnational Studies." The course asks whether the West--a civilization that sets the standards for all... more

The link leads to the syllabus for a course that I taught at Haverford College in Spring 2018: "Does the West Exist? Comparative and Transnational Studies." The course asks whether the West--a civilization that sets the standards for all other civilizations and cultures--exists. To answer that, we consider comparative, transnational, and area-focused perspectives on the way we live now, and on the ideas, institutions, processes, and events that shaped it.

DESCRIPTION
In a globalizing world, we need to think across borders. But how to do that? This course seeks to answer this question by considering the strengths and weaknesses of transnational, comparative, and area-focused perspectives on the way we live now, and on the ideas, institutions, processes, and events that shaped it. Our guiding question is: Does the West--a civilization that sets the standards for all other civilizations and cultures--exist? To answer that question, we consider the difference it makes to see ideas, institutions, and processes in transnational or entangled perspective, looking at how these phenomena were shaped and re-shaped as they were passed around the globe and reinterpreted by various actors. So we will look at the impact the Haitian Revolution had on the Black Atlantic and on White Europe of the nineteenth century, at how various actors in the countries colonized by Europeans shaped and reshaped ideas held by their colonizers, and at whether Egypt and African civilizations had a much greater impact on the civilization of classical Greece and Rome than many of us now like to think. We will consider various comparisons across countries, cultures, and areas, taking note of how and when they show us similarities we had ignored, or differences we had missed. So we will look at comparisons of economic change in China and Europe, at the similarities and differences among secularisms in different areas of the world, and at the similarities among Western communitarian and Islamist critiques of modernity. We then consider the unique perspective gained by considering ideas, institutions, and processes in the context of the area or region in which they occur, attending to the similarities across that region. So we will consider what is common to Latin American constitutionalisms, as well as their similarities and differences with constitutionalism in the US. We will look at the power of unexpected models or analogies, and what insights can be gained by seeing Alexander Hamilton as a Creole revolutionary like Simon Bolivar, or seeing the founding ideas of Pakistan as remarkably like the Zionist ideas that founded the state of Israel. And finally, we consider whether modernity is essentially Western, and whether the best response to European hegemony on the part of non-Europeans is to take the nativist road of playing up the differences between modernity and one’s own culture, or to reinterpret modernity by reworking it and adding one’s own ideas to it.

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Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies

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