/pdf/red-skin-white-masks-rejecting-the-colonial-politics-of-2cjykv975i.pdf

Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition

This article presents what we term a raciolinguistic perspective, which theorizes the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of language and race. Rather than taking for granted existing categories for parsing and classifying race and language, we seek to understand how and why these categories have been co-naturalized, and to imagine their denaturalization as part of a broader structural project of contesting white supremacy. We explore five key components of a raciolinguistic perspective: (i) historical and contemporary colonial co-naturalizations of race and language; (ii) perceptions of racial and linguistic difference; (iii) regimentations of racial and linguistic categories; (iv) racial and linguistic intersections and assemblages; and (v) contestations of racial and linguistic power formations. These foci reflect our investment in developing a careful theorization of various forms of racial and linguistic inequality on the one hand, and our commitment to the imagination and creation of more just societies on the other. (Race, language ideologies, colonialism, governmentality, enregisterment, structural inequality)*

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/30FFC5253F465905D75CDFF1C1363AE3/S0047404517000562a.pdf/div-class-title-unsettling-race-and-language-toward-a-raciolinguistic-perspective-div.pdf

Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective

Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) and Darren Aronofsky’s\nBlack Swan (2010) are films about women directed by men. Both films unorthodoxly\nchart women artists’ struggle with the discipline imposed on them by\nthe arts and by their live-in mothers. By portraying mothers as their daughters’\noppressors, both films disturb the naïve “women = victims and men = perpetrators”\nbinary. Simultaneously, they deploy audiovisual violence to exhibit the\nviolence of society’s gender and sexuality policy norms and use gender-coded\nromance narratives to subvert the same gender codes from within this gender\ndiscourse. Using Judith Butler’s and Michael Foucault’s theories, we argue\nthat Haneke and Aronofsky “do” feminism unconventionally by exposing the\nnexus of women’s complicity with omnipresent societal power structures that\nsafeguard gender norms. These films showcase women concurrently as victim-products\nand complicit partisans of socially constructed gender ideology to\nemphasize that this ideology can be destabilized only when women “do” their\ngender and sexuality differently through acts of subversion.

“Undoing” Gender: Nexus of Complicity and Acts of Subversion in The Piano Teacher and Black Swan

In this report I argue that environmental racism is constituent of racial capitalism. While the environmental justice movement has been a success on many levels, there is compelling evidence that i...

Geographies of race and ethnicity II: Environmental racism, racial capitalism and state-sanctioned violence

My study investigates the often obscured connections between the emergence of Eu ro pean liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eigh teenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Cuban Counterpoint (1940), Fernando Ortiz described " peoples from all four quarters of the globe " who labored in the " new world " to produce tobacco and sugar for Eu ro pean consumption. Observing that sugar linked the histories of colonial settlers, native peoples, and slave labor, followed by Chinese and other migrants, Ortiz commented that sugar was " mulatto " from the start. C. L. R. James asserted in The Black Jacobins (1938), that the eighteenth-century slave society in San Domingo connected Eu rope, Africa, and the Americas. He declared that the fortunes created by the slavery-based societies in the Americas gave rise to the French bourgeoi-sie, producing the conditions for the " rights of man " demanded in the Revolution of 1789. 2 These understandings that the " new world " of Eu ro-pean settlers, indigenous peoples, Africans, and Asians in the Americas was intimately related to the rise of liberal modernity are the inspiration for my investigation. 3 Yet I work with the premise that we actually know little about these " intimacies of four continents, " despite separate scholarship about single societies, peoples, or regions. The modern division of knowledge into academic disciplines, focused on discrete areas and objects of interest to the modern national university, has profoundly

The Intimacies of Four Continents

Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism

The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism

Represent and Destroy

This essay introduces and theorizes the central concerns of this special issue, “Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism.” Financialization, debt, and the accelerated concentration of wealth today work through social relations already configured and disposed by imperial conquest and racial capitalism. In the Americas broadly and the United States specifically, colonization and transatlantic slavery set in motion the dynamics and differential racialized valuations that continue to underwrite particular forms of subjection, property, commerce, and territoriality. The conception of economies of dispossession introduced in this essay draws attention to the overriding importance of rationalities of abstraction and commensurability for racial capitalism. The essay problematizes the ways in which dispossession is conventionally treated as a self-evident and circumscribed practice of unjust taking and subtractive action. Instead, working across the lethal confluences of imperial conquest and racial capitalist predation, this essay critically situates the logic of propriation that organizes and underwrites predatory value in the historical present. Against the commensurabilities and rationalities of debt and finance capitalism, conditioned through the proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, the essay gestures toward alternative frameworks for building collective capacities for what the authors describe as a grounded relationality.

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Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities

"The Killing Joke of Sympathy" reconstructs the centrality of the "race novel" for the consolidation of racial liberalism as an official and limited state of antiracism in the United States after World War II. In particular, it considers the evidentiary and emotional values ascribed to literature by the Julius Rosenwald Fund, arguably the most influential philanthropy at mid-century dedicated to race relations. For the fund, literature was a privileged tool for antiracist social transformation because of its unique capability to arouse white sympathies. Jodi Melamed argues that such ideas shaped a dominant practice of reading that had a regulative effect, narrowing what counted as acceptable antiracism.
Melamed reads Chester Himes's End of a Primitive as a novel where we see satire deliberately misfired in an attempt to dehegemonize racial liberal meanings secured through the discourse of "the race novel." Featuring the murder of a white, female race relations professional by an African American author resembling Himes, End of a Primitive "predicts" (through metafictional address) that the force of racial liberal reading practices will cause the novel to be misread by white liberal readers as protest, rather than satire. At the same time, the novel constructs an imaginative exercise that dares readers to go against the grain of such reading practices, to experience the novel's humor, and to "get the handle to the joke" of their own confinement. For the reader who fails the imaginative exercise, End of a Primitive nonetheless debunks liberal ideas of sympathy as a guarantee of racial progress.

Jodi Melamed

Papers

Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism

The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism

Represent and Destroy

Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities

The Killing Joke of Sympathy: Chester Himes's "End of a Primitive" Sounds the Limits of Midcentury Racial Liberalism