Ethnic Groups in Conflict

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Aihwa Ong. Durham, NIC: Duke University Press, 1999. ix. 322 pp., notes, bibliography, index.

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality

In recent decades, struggles for recognition have increasingly dominated the political landscape.1 Recognition theorists such as Charles Taylor (1994) and Axel Honneth (1995) seek to interpret and justify these struggles through the idea that our identity is shaped, at least partly, by our relations with other people. Because our identity is shaped in this way, it is alleged that feelings of self-worth, self-respect and self-esteem are possible only if we are positively recognised for who we are. Consequently, for many political theorists, recognition is an integral component of a satisfactory modern theory of justice, as well as the means by which both historical and contemporary political struggles can be understood and justified.

The Politics of Recognition

The Racial Contract

MC 281 is the second in the required sophomore sequence for Social Relations and Policy. In this course, we will explore the interactions and experiences between and among various groups in American history. We will consider how Americans both defended and contested prevailing definitions of fitness for citizenship and inclusion in the political process and American life, and how groups sought to gain access to social and political equality. This course focuses on the history of relationships within and between different groups in the United States, and explores the complexities of those relations. Rarely centered solely on race or ethnicity, such interactions were also affected by gender, sexuality, religion, nation, and class. We will also explore the shifting definitions of race and ethnicity. Students will analyze not only the experiences of the different groups, but also the connections between them to assess the larger dynamics and their implications for public policy.

Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda and Robbie Shilliam - Confronting the Global Colour Line: an Introduction, PART 1: CONCEPTUALISING THE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS OF RACE AND RACISM, 2. Errol Henderson - Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism in International Relations Theory, 3. Debra Thompson - Through, Against, and Beyond the Racial State: The Transnational Stratum of Race, 4. Branwen Gruffydd-Jones - "Good Governance' and 'State Failure': the Pseudo-Science of Statesmen in Our Times, 5. John M. Hobson - Re-Embedding the Global Colour Line within Post-1945 International Theory, 6. Srdjan Vucetic - Against Race Taboos: The Global Colour Line in Philosophical Discourse, PART 2: INTERNATIONAL PRACTICES OF RACE AND RACISM, 7. Randolph B. Persaud - Colonial Violence: Race and Gender on the Sugar Plantations of British Guiana, 8. Sankaran Krishna - A Postcolonial Racial/Spatial Order: Gandhi, Ambedkar and the Construction of the International, 9. Richard Seymour - The Cold War, American Anticommunism and the Global 'Colour Line', 10. Robert Knox - Race, Racialisation and Rivalry in the International Legal Order, PART 3: REFLECTIONS ON THE GLOBAL COLOUR LINE, 11. David Roediger - What Would It Mean to Transform International Relations?, 12. Charles W. Mills - Unwriting and Unwhitening the World

Race and racism in international relations : confronting the global colour line

This article compares the regulation of interracial intimacies in North America, contending that anti-miscegenation laws in the United States and Canada’s Indian Act regimes are both striking and comparable examples of the state’s regulation of the intimate sphere. The author argues that the social signifiers of race and gender, tied together with sexuality, are interlocking sets of power relations and these intersecting discourses are integral to understanding the comparative regulation of interracial intimacy in North America. In the circumstances of anti-miscegenation laws and the Indian Act, the transgression of gendered/raced social boundaries, the control of raced/gendered sexualities, the interlocking and mutually reinforcing nature of patriarchal, white supremacist and capitalist systems of domination, the threat of non-white access to white capital, and the predicament of racial categorization exist as a corollary of the state’s regulation of interracial intimate life. This article reveals the law and state as important sites of the creation and manipulation of racial boundaries, acting as producers and reproducers of racial ideas, and demonstrates that the interracial transgressions of sexual space were also perceived as transgressions of social, economic, and political boundaries between races, posing a threat to the dominant white and masculine hegemony in North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Racial Ideas and Gendered Intimacies: the Regulation of Interracial Relationships in North America:

The contemporary lexicon of black politics contains a litany of emotive reactions to the entrenched racism of American society. After the murder of nine African Americans in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, Claudia Rankine (2015) argued that “the condition of black life is one of mourning.” Christopher Lebron (2013) maintains that, as a society, our collective response to pervasive racial inequality ought to be shame. White fragility, a term coined by Robin DiAngelo (2011), describes the inability of white people to tolerate uncomfortable conversations about race, which often leads to defensiveness and anger toward people of color. The nonviolent philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1986) is often invoked as the racial benchmark for love and forgiveness. White guilt, racial threat, racial resentment, white empathy, and even racial terror are all politicized emotions, which include those held individually or collectively and the behaviors born from them, expressed in the political realm. In one way, it is unsurprising that scholars are beginning to pay more attention to the politics of emotion. In the humanities, cultural studies, and the social sciences, the “affective turn” contends that the centrality of reason and rationality

An Exoneration of Black Rage

. This article demonstrates that though the political nature of race is evident and constitutes an important area of research, there is a dearth of literature on race in English Canadian political science particularly as compared to other social sciences. The article provides explanations for this disciplinary silence, including methodological fuzziness, dominant elite-focused and colour-blind approaches to the study of politics, and the prevalence of ideas and foci about the nature of Canadian politics. In order to avoid the danger of disciplinary lag, it concludes with several ways of addressing this disparity between the political science and the society it purports to analyze.Resume. Malgre l'essence politique evidente du concept de «race» et son importance indeniable comme sujet de recherche, la litterature de science politique canadienne-anglaise s'y attarde tres peu, surtout en comparaison des autres sciences sociales. L'article explique les causes de ce silence disciplinaire. Celles-ci incluent un flou methodologique, une approche surtout centree sur l'elite, une perspective «daltonienne» concernant l'etude de la politique, ainsi que la predominance de certaines idees quant a la nature de la politique canadienne. Afin d'eviter un danger de lacune disciplinaire, l'article propose des solutions permettant de reduire l'ecart entre la science politique et son objet d'etude, soit la societe reelle.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0008423908080827

Is Race Political

Though race is most commonly associated with domestic politics, the concept itself was born in the transnational realm. This article conceptualizes race as a system of global power relations that has changed over time, manifests differently across space and exists on multiple analytical levels. Drawing from the insights of international relations, comparative politics and critical race theory, it argues that race is a transnational norm or idea that can independently affect both domestic policy outcomes and international relations among nation-states. The article explores several promising avenues of research in the examination of the varied manifestations of race in international and domestic realms and ends with a brief discussion of continuing challenges and future research agendas in the comparative and international study of race.

Debra Thompson

Papers

Race and racism in international relations : confronting the global colour line

Racial Ideas and Gendered Intimacies: the Regulation of Interracial Relationships in North America:

An Exoneration of Black Rage

Is Race Political

Through, against and beyond the racial state: the transnational stratum of race