Critical race and whiteness studies: What has been, what might be (Editorial) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 2019
are to be commended for coordinating and conceptually framing this special section, a most timely contribution to recent trends in the anthropology of race and ethnicity. Conversations on this important concern are being held in many parts of the world, not uncommonly within volatile climates and under embattled circumstances. I was introduced to the Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity (ARE) Network when I attended the European Association of Social Anthropologists' (EASA) 2016 biennial meeting in Milan, Italy. I appreciated the significance and indeed the urgency of establishing a supportive, publicly engaged space for anthropologists in Europe and their kindred thinking colleagues elsewhere who share with them interests in race and ethnicity, racialisation and racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and many related matters reflecting how race and ethnicity intermesh with each other and with other mutually constitutive axes of difference and inequality salient in various situations and contexts. The dynamic ebbs and flows along with the ambiguities and shifting terms of race-making-an assemblage of social relations, encounters and practices situated in and across time and space-make the tools, lenses and ethics of sociocultural anthropology's ethnographic inquiry particularly useful. About a year after Milan, I participated in a fairly prestigious interdisciplinary conference where I observed very different circumstances and commitments. I encountered a number of social scientists who insisted that the language of race was not appropriate for our work group's drafting of the conference's statement on the social and political challenges faced in many parts of the world today. An anthropologist from France was perhaps the most vociferous critic of the use of the race concept. The perspective he espoused in that discussion seemed to follow the colour-blind, race-evasive and post-racial line of thought that exists in parts of Europe as well as in the United States and Latin America. Contributors to this publication attest to this social fact as it is manifested in different national contexts. However, in all those settings, there are also countervailing forces, such as the socio-political confluences that have given rise to inclusive projects promoting 'Europeanisation from below', as Marleen de Witte points out in her contribution here.
NEW TERRITORIES IN CRITICAL WHITENESS STUDIES Editorial
2013
The impetus for this special issue can be traced back several years, when members of this issue’s editorial team—Madeline-Sophie Abbas, Say Burgin and Julio Decker, then MA and PhD students—organised the ‘New Territories in Critical Whiteness Studies’ postgraduate conference at our home university, the University of Leeds, in August of 2010. The conference launched the postgraduate/early career researcher arm of the international, interdisciplinary White Spaces Research Network, established in 2009 by Dr Shona Hunter (also University of Leeds). This special issue represents one of the many collaborative projects sustained through the postgraduate network (see for instance, Pederson & Samaluk 2012).
Introduction: Intersecting whiteness, interdisciplinary debates
Ethnicities, 2010
This article sets out the purview of this special issue of Ethnicities. Whiteness Studies has moved from the margins and has become an accepted focus for study in Critical Race Studies. We argue that current scholarship is developing the paradigm empirically and theoretically, and does so without need to justify its approach. This special issue incorporates a number of national and transnational contexts, is located in a number of disciplines and theoretical approaches, and develops the intersections between whiteness and gender, queer studies, migration, nationalism and militarization.
Unsettling Whiteness: disruptions and (re)locations
2014
Unsettling Whiteness brings together an international collection that considers anew the politics, practices and representations of whiteness at a time when nations worldwide continue to grapple with issues that are underwritten by whiteness. It draws together case studies of the performance of whiteness from significantly different political and social contexts with shared purpose; to investigate (re)constructions of whiteness, to explore the mechanisms which give whiteness power (and make power itself whitened), and to dissect the social processes through which whiteness is made visible and invisible. The collection makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates on whiteness by unsettling historical definitions and examining artistic, intimate and institutional attempts to reinforce or dismantle white norms and privileges. The case studies and analyses offer insightful reading on their own, but together offer a unique transdisciplinary approach to the complex task of exp...
Comparative Migration Studies
In this rejoinder we argue, based on the papers of this commentary series, that ‘race’ is such a tricky notion because it can be used in (at least) two very different and contradictory ways—as a concept to disentangle racism and racialisation (what M’charek calls the ‘work race actually does’) and as a way of categorization and social classification, in which case it might create the very essentialised hierarchies ‘race’ as a critical concept tries to disentangle. We wonder if it is indeed possible to use ‘race’ as a concept without evoking ‘race’ as a social classification. At first, we give a short summary of the four discussion papers and then delve into two aspects the papers share, namely the need for spatial and temporal contextualization and comparison, as well as their choice not to take up our invitation to compare race as a category with gender. In a second step we will discuss two points arising from the papers, (1) ‘race’ as category, not as lens, often resulting in esse...
A Global Critical Race and Racism Framework: Racial Entanglements and Deep and Malleable Whiteness
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity , 2018
Twenty years after Bonilla-Silva developed the analytic components of a structural race perspective and called for “comparative work on racialization in various societies,” U.S.-centric race theory continues to be mostly rooted in a U.S. focus. What is missing is a framework that explores race and racism as a modern global project that takes shape differently in diverse structural and ideological forms across all geographies but is based in global white supremacy. Drawing from Bonilla-Silva’s national racialized social systems approach, global South scholars, and critical race scholars in the world-systems tradition, the author advances a global critical race and racism framework that highlights two main areas: (1) core components that include the “state,” “economy,” “institutions,” and “discourses” and “representations,” as divided by “racist structure” and “racist ideology” and shaped by the “history” of and current forms of transnational racialization and contemporary “global” linkages, and (2) the production of deep and malleable global whiteness. With this framework, both the permanence and flexibility of racism across the globe can be seen, in all its overt, invisible, and insidious forms, that ultimately sustains global white supremacy in the twenty-first century.
Critical Philosophy of Race: An Introduction (special section)
Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2019
This special section brings together scholars working in Critical Philosophy of Race to explore questions of racism, coloniality, and migration, and in doing so, offers a glimpse into some of the scholarship currently being undertaken in this emerging field. The section has its origins in a one-day workshop, On Anti-Racism: A Critical Philosophy of Race Symposium, which took place in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia in October 2017. The symposium participants, Amir Jaima, Helen Ngo, and Bryan Mukandi, are here joined by Lori Gallegos and Chelsea Bond, in an effort to continue and extend some of the conversations initiated at that event.