Unraveling “Race” for the Twenty-First Century (original) (raw)

2019, In Exotic No More: Anthropology for the Contemporary World. Jeremy MacClancy, ed. University of Chicago Press

Abstract

Anthropological studies of race and racism in relation to the cultural, political, and economic forces that coconstruct them over historical time and geographical space have proliferated over the past few decades. In good part, the heightened interest is a response to intensifying racial tensions and identities in many parts of the world. In the history of humankind, race has come to be a significant dimension of positioning and power. As an ideologically charged distinction in social stratification, race is a culturally encoded social classification applied to people presumed to share common physical or biological traits. Racial categories have been used to mark purported natural differences even in contexts of relatively ostensible homogeneity. In such cases, racially designated populations are believed to share, at least in part, some socially salient ancestry and heritable characteristics construed to be of social consequence to the dominant social order. Racially stratified societies vary in the extent to which socially salient ancestry, perceived appearance, and sociocultural status (e.g., education, income, wealth, religion)-along with varying combinations of these-are used as cri-You are reading copyrighted material published by University of Chicago Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher.

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

References (32)

  1. Fischer, Dawn-Elissa. 2013. "Blackness, Race, and Language Politics in Japanese Hiphop." Transforming Anthropology 21 (2): 135-52.
  2. Friedman, Kajsa Ekholm, and Jonathan Friedman. 2011. Modernities, Class, and the Contradic- tions of Globalization: The Anthropology of Global Systems. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
  3. Garner, Steve. 2017. Racisms: An Introduction. Second edition. London: Sage. Features up-to-date information on trends in scholarship and public life, including the impact of social movements and activists such as Hourida Bouteldja; she sheds light on the asymmetry between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in French politics.
  4. Gledhill, John. 2015. The New War on the Poor: The Production of Insecurity in Latin America. London: Zed Books. Through case studies of Mexico and Brazil, this book pre sents a nuanced analysis of state securitization and assaults on the poor.
  5. Golash-Boza, Tanya. 2010. Yo Soy Negro: Blackness in Peru. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
  6. Goodman, Alan H., Yolanda T. Moses, and Joseph Jones. 2012. Race: Are We So Different? Malden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
  7. Gravlee, Clarence. 2009. "How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment of Social Inequality." American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139: 47-57.
  8. Guimarães, Antonio Sérgio Alfredo. 2012. "The Brazilian System of Racial Classification." Ethnic and Racial Studies 35 (7): 1157-1162.
  9. Hale, Charles. 2006. Más que Un Indio: Racial Ambivalence and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Guatemala. Santa Fe: School of American Research. (SAR) Press. This book exemplifies recent trends in the study of race in Latin America under neo- liberal conditions.
  10. Harris, Marvin. 1970. "Referential Ambiguity in the Calculus of Brazilian Racial Identity." Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 26:1-14. This is a classic anthropological study of the color/racial continuum in Brazil.
  11. Harrison, Faye V. 1995. "The Persistent Power of 'Race' in the Cultural and Political Economy of Racism." Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 47-74.
  12. ---. 2005. "Introduction: Global Perspectives on Human Rights and Interlocking In- equalities of Race, Gender, and Related Dimensions of Power." In Resisting Racism and Xenophobia: Global Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Human Rights, ed. Faye V. Harrison, 1-31. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
  13. ---. 2008. "Global Apartheid, Foreign Policy, and Human Rights." In Transnational Black- ness: Navigating the Global Color Line, ed. Manning Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones, 19-40. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  14. ---. 2012. "Race, Racism, and Antiracism: Implications for Human Rights." Guest essay in Race: Are We So Different? by Alan H. Goodman, Yolanda T. Moses, and Joseph L. Jones, 237-244. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
  15. Hartigan, John, ed. 2013. Anthropology of Race: Genes, Biology, and Culture. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Study Press.
  16. Ho, Christine G. T., and James Louky. 2012. Humane Migration: Establishing Legitimacy and Rights for Displaced People. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press.
  17. Ives, Sarah. 2017. Steeped in Heritage: The Racial Politics of South African Rooibos Tea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. An ethnography on the traditional commodity associated with indigeneity; it focuses on claims to indigenous identity by Cape Colored and Afrikaner groups.
  18. Rana, Junaid. 2016. "The Racial Infrastructure of the Terror-Industrial Complex." Social Text 34 (4): 111-38.
  19. Rana's article elucidates the racialization of South Asian and other Muslims in the context of the war on terror in the United States and transnationally.
  20. Reiter, Bernd, and Kimberly Eison Simmons, eds. 2012. Afro-Descendants, Identity, and the Struggle for Development in the Americas. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
  21. Roberts, Dorothy. 2011. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. New York: New Press. Critical examination of the use and effects of new genomic technologies on reinvent- ing race.
  22. Ross, Fiona C. 2003. Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. London: Pluto Press.
  23. ---. 2010. Raw Life, New Hope: Decency, Housing, and Everyday Life in a Post-apartheid Community. Cape Town: 24 University of Cape Town Press.
  24. Russell, John G. 1991. "Race and Reflexivity: The Black Other in Contemporary Japanese Mass Culture." Cultural Anthropology 6 (1): 3-25.
  25. ---. 2015. "Historically, Japan Is No Stranger to Blacks, nor to Blackface." Japan Times, April 19. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2015/04/19/voices/historically-japan -is-no-stranger-to-blacks-nor-to-blackface/#.WWBsBITytqQ. Accessed on July 29, 2017.
  26. Santos, Beatriz dos. 2014. "Black Women and Their Situation of Discrimination and Vulnera- bility in Brazil." In Feminism: Perspectives, Stereotypes/Misperceptions and Social Implica- tions, ed. Pearche Stroud, 49-68. New York: Nova Science Publishers. A black Brazilian anthropologist's perspectives on African diasporic feminism and on the forms of racialized gendered or gendered racist discrimination black women con- front.
  27. Schweotzer, Erwin. 2015. The Making of Griqua, Inc.: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Au- tonomy in South Africa. Wien, Germany: LIT Verlag. This ethnography draws on Jean and John Comaroff 's notion of "Ethnicity, Inc." to ex- amine the process of post-apartheid identity formation associated with struggle for land reform and autonomy.
  28. Sheriff, Robin E. 2001. Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
  29. Sheriff 's book is an important intervention in studies of race and racial democracy; it elucidates three different registers of discursive practice-descriptive, pragmatic/euphe- mistic, and classificatory. The latter acknowledges polar designations of racial difference.
  30. Smedley, Audrey, and Brian D. Smedley. 2012. Race in North America: The Origin and Evolu- tion of a Worldview. Fourth edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. This is now a classic intellectual and social history of race in the United States. Most recent edition brings psychologist B. D. Smedley on board with his analysis of the health disparities implicating the racial worldview.
  31. Smith, Christin A. 2014. "Putting Prostitutes in Their Place: Black Women, Social Violence, and the Brazilian Case of Sirlei Carvalho." Latin American Perspectives 41 (1): 107-23.
  32. ---. 2016. Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil. Chicago: Univer- sity of Illinois Press. An ethnography on racism in Brazil, with a focus on Salvador, Bahia; its analysis of antiblack violence is sophisticated, organized around the consciousness-raising role that street theater performance plays.