Racialization

A persistência de uma certa memória política que, insistentemente, invoca a experiência colonial portuguesa, em toda a sua largura e profundidade, como um momento contínuo de excepcional diplomacia cultural, tem encontrado nos últimos anos uma resposta interessante por parte de uma historiografia que se tem ocupado em escrutinar a dimensão retórica impressa, durante e pelo Estado Novo, no domínio das relações inter-étnicas nos diferentes contextos coloniais. Por outro lado, essa interpelação tem sido insuficiente para compreender a espessura e a evolução da questão racial durante a ditadura, em particular os contextos que envolvem as chamadas minorias intermediárias que dispunham de recursos inacessíveis à maioria negra mas que, ainda assim, foram objecto de um variado conjunto de práticas de subalternização. Nesse sentido, e partindo de um exemplo tão diverso quanto complexo, o das mencionadas minorias intermediárias de origem asiática, este artigo pretende discutir as diferentes raízes e influências dos critérios racializadores em que assentaram os mecanismos burocráticos e populares que visavam impor e legitimar uma desigual distribuição de recursos políticos, sociais e económicos em território moçambicano durante o séc. XX.

This article addresses biomedical forms of racial targeting under neoliberal biopolitics. Target technologies, such as race-based medicine and racialized environmental biomonitoring, are ostensibly deployed under neoliberal biopolitics to affirm life: They are said to enable the tailoring of biomedical intervention to vulnerable racial communities and are advocated as the means through which to foster the health of those populations. This article focuses on two target technologies: The first race-based drug--BiDil--approved by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration in 2005 and marketed as a drug specifically for self-identified black subjects that suffer from heart failure; and medical hot spotting, a practice that began in Camden, New Jersey in 2007 and that uses GIS technologies and the logics of racial profiling to identify populations that are medically vulnerable, in order to facilitate preemptive care. These technologies, we argue, operate as forms of spatialized racial governance. In order to explore this idea, we examine the workings of these technologies on two scales: The administrative level, where racialized bodies are demarcated in space as targets requiring biomedical intervention; and the embodied level, where individual bodies and communities are disciplined through these technologies to embody race as a biological ontology. Our central claim is that race-based medicine and medical hotspotting position race as proxy for corporeal/genetic truth, geopolitically delimit life, and threaten to make health and other social inequalities even worse. These factors are indicative of how racial health is governed under neoliberal biopolitics. In the case of BiDil, race is ontologized as/for a market; accumulation is achieved through customization. Medical hot spotting, by contrast, ontologizes race in/as space in order to secure cost efficiencies in the U.S. health care system and minimize uncompensated-care debt; self-care based on racial targeting is promoted to mitigate the decline of the welfare state. While these target technologies are said to promote the life of vulnerable populations, they might also be said to limit how that life can be lived, whether through logics of spatial apartheid or structural abandonment. Rather than focus on achieving relentless life in neoliberal times, what is called for is a recognition of forms of death-in-life and explorations of biomedical care that challenge spatial and racial ontologies.

This article examines the repositioning of racialized credit risk produced by new regulatory practices that have emerged in the neoliberal era. As increasingly volatile financial markets have periodically threatened the ability of the banking sector to supply credit, US regulators have adopted more aggressive roles to isolate ‘troubled assets’ and restore the norms of risk management. Revisiting the emergence of the US subprime mortgage market in the early 1990s, I use this framework to assess a critical question for urban political economy: how could decades of racial exclusion from US credit markets have been transformed so quickly and decisively into the exploitation of minority borrowers within the subprime market? The article identifies a series of regulatory practices associated with the management of the late-1980s banking crisis, arguing their distinctive orientation towards the circulation of risk created a new legal and market space for high-risk loans. I then examine the migration of those emergency risk practices into the institutional venues that shaped the subprime market and that differentially exposed minority borrowers to heightened rent-seeking. The results suggest new avenues for urban political economy emerging from a broader conceptualization of state relationships to financial risk.

This paper reads Kim Barry Brunhuber’s novel Kameleon Man as an important exploration of different heterotopian spaces offering a reflection of our contemporary society in terms of the production and consumption of culture, racialization and identity. Stacey Schmidt, a twenty-one year-old black student, appears as a modern flâneur moving in urban landscapes from one heteretopia to the next in his quest for success in the fashion industry as a mixed-race model. He is also acutely aware of his own shifting positionality hinging on the ambiguous sign and site of the hyphen, which has been described by Fred Wah as that marked (or unmarked) space that both binds and divides. This heno-poetic (Grk heno-, one) punct, this flag of the many in the one, yet 'less than one and double' (Bhabha 177), is the operable tool that both compounds difference and underlines sameness (Faking 72-73). Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I will draw from the European philosophical tradition of Foucault and Benjamin as well as from urban studies, and will put these in conversation with some recent Canadian critical mixed-race theory in order to bring into view the specificity of Stacey's experience as an urban, racialized, mixed-race Canadian man.

As the 19th century brought the United States further into a modernity constitutive of U.S. Imperialism and expansion, racialized systems of inequality within U.S. borders continued to shape the lives of enslaved and free African Americans.  As traditional access to the U.S. capitalist system was restricted or even closed to them, African Americans sought to occupy, exist and persist within a space of their own making.  Thus, the Homeplace emerges as a site of support, coping and resistance to these structures of systematically racializing mechanisms of inequality.  This paper will discuss archaeological investigations of a multi-generational 19th and early 20th century homestead settled on what was the Southeastern Illinois frontier and occupied through the Civil War, Jim Crow up to the present-day.  These investigations explore how the material culture of this site reflect the realities of African American life in the 19th century, and question how this material carries within it evidence of the daily practices which create and sustain the sometimes tangible and at once intangible space of Homeplace.

Until the 1990s, the Kurdish issue in Turkey largely involved the Turkish state, an ethnic group and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). The 2000s witnessed community-level clashes between Kurds and Turks, signalling the Turkish population's rise as an actor in the issue. This paper makes two claims. First, communal clashes indicate that Kurdish identity is not an ethnic identity alone, but is experiencing a racialization process, based on four indicators: emphasis on physical characteristics in the definitions of Kurds; linking Kurdish identity with the absence of certain moral characteristics; the increasing assignment, rather than self-assertion, of Kurdish identity; and discourses of racial extinction. Second, the racialization of Kurdish identity corresponds to historical change in conceptions of diversity. Racialization became possible after a distinct Kurdish identity was recognized but normatively unwelcomed.

"This thesis (1) explores the racialised aspects of media representations of athletic bodies in purposefully selected British men’s magazines; and (2) considers how these images influence white men’s perceptions of their own racialised and gendered identities and those of Others. The rationale for a study of this nature emerged from a reading of much recent literature which has suggested that black male athletic bodies, in particular, have become ever more ordinary features of contemporary sport and leisure media. Liberal commentaries have argued that many subjugated racialised social groups have utilised sporting and leisure stages in order to challenge the fallacies of psychological and biological inferiority
propagated historically by patriarchal and bio-racist discourses. Thus, while Black women remain underrepresented in media spaces, images of their male counterparts, particularly
those of African-Caribbean heritage, have accessed the realm of the popular en masse and have acquired almost superhuman status in late modern times. However, while some uncritical commentaries equate visibility with social progress and improvement, this thesis explores the nature of media representations of Black male bodies more critically and also
illuminates the racialised aspects and privileges of the often invisible sporting body, the white male athlete.

In order to do this Critical Race Theory (CRT) and elements of poststructuralist theory, were employed together as a theoretical framework that guided: (a) a semiotic analysis of the racialised aspects of male athletic bodies in British men’s magazines (Men’s Health, Sport and Jump); (b) observations of white men in gyms and while doing parkour; and (c) semi-structured interviews with physically active white men and the racialised and gendered
aspects of their readings of media images of male bodies. Adopting a CRT approach to media analysis centres ‘race’, racism and whiteness while addressing the colour-blindness of previous studies of men’s magazines. The study highlights the importance of studying white male athletic bodies and masculinities while implicating them in perpetuating racialised processes in sport and leisure arenas. That is, this study argues that media representations of athletic bodies and masculinities contribute to a white male supremacist discourse and therefore must not be read in isolation from processes of racialisation.

The thesis contends that, paradoxically, it is imperative to centralise white masculinities and make visible their privileges, assumptions and predilections, in order to distort and highlight white male supremacy. This is particularly important considering the frequency with which these discourses are made invisible by liberal academic and media institutions."

Können Muslim_innen als Muslim_innen Objekte einer rassistischen Diskriminierung sein? Ein häufiger Einwand lautet, dass religiöse Zugehörigkeit frei wählbar und damit veränderlich sei, weshalb man in diesem Fall nicht von Rassismus sprechen könne. In dem Beitrag wird dieser Position widersprochen und dargelegt, welchen Rassifizierungsprozessen als Muslim_innen markierte Menschen in Deutschland (und anderen europäischen Migrationsgesellschaften) heute unterliegen. Dabei werden auch die Traditionslinien christlich-islamfeindlicher Diskurse des Mittelalters sowie orientalistischer Diskurse, die in den Kolonialismus zurückreichen, im aktuellen antimuslimischen Rassismus nachgezeichnet.

A racial division of labour, or a social distribution of productive tasks between categories and groups of people defined racially, ethnically, or nationally, can occur within nations, between nations, and/or globally. I will argue that racial divisions of labour are only possible under capitalism, but their relationship to concrete class-formations is complex and not reducible to the effects of a separate ‘economic base.’ It is not the case that they are determined by economic self-interest on either the part of capitalists or workers: rather, insofar as capitalism maintains itself as a system, i.e., through nation-states in a global states-system, it tends to encourage the formation of racial distinctions tied to specific occupational categories. I thus compare and contrast classical and contemporary Marxist accounts of the formation of ‘race’ in the global political economy, with neo-Marxist and post-Marxist theories which have drawn on diverse inter-disciplinary methods and ontologies to critique ‘class-reductionism.' Despite some common ground, I argue that a more generous interpretation of Marx’s historical materialism can address this apparent impasse as well as respond to current developments in the race-class nexus.

"In September, I wrote a piece describing my perspective as a disabled woman of color and psychiatric survivor. I explored how race-specific self-killings are differentially represented by the media to demonstrate how public perceptions of suicide depend on social and political contexts. My intention was to de-sensationalize model minority suicide in order to draw attention to how particular non-white bodies are often presumed to be volatile and violent.

This month, I look more closely at clinical explanations of ethnic minority suicide and respond by citing current non-clinical and community-based anti-racist reflections on the significance of emotional pain and anger."