"Ready to shoot and do shoot": black working-class self-defense and community politics in Harlem, New York, during the 1920s

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, black people in New York City encountered white violence, especially police brutality in Manhattan. The black community used various strategies to curtail white mob violence and police brutality, one of which was self-defense. This article examines blacks’ response to violence, specifically the debate concerning police brutality and self-defense in Harlem during the 1920s. While historians have examined race riots, blacks’ everyday encounters with police violence in the North have received inadequate treatment. By approaching everyday violence and black responses—self-defense, legal redress, and journalists’ remonstrations—as a process of political development, this article argues that the systematic violence perpetrated by the police both mobilized and politicized blacks individually and collectively to defend their community, but also contributed to a community consciousness that established police brutality as a legitimate issue for black protest.     

Analysis of ante mortem trauma in three modern skeletal populations

When archaeological skeletons are assessed, the prevalence (and patterns of bone involvement) of trauma is important. The number and pattern of fractures can be used to gain insight into the occurrence of interpersonal violence, workload and living conditions. However, the question remains as to how these results should be interpreted—such as what constitutes high or low levels of trauma? The aim of this study was to investigate the occurrence of trauma in a population of modern Greeks living in Crete, as well as South African (SA) whites and blacks in the Pretoria Bone and Raymond Dart collections. The sample comprised mostly of older individuals (n = 90–100 within a sex‐population group). Each skeleton was studied for healed trauma. For the vertebrae, only spondylolysis was assessed. In the Greek sample, it was found that 42% of the males and 46% of females had at least one fracture, with corresponding figures of 63 and 44% for SA whites and 83 and 69% for SA blacks. Radius, rib and femur fractures were most common in Greeks, with skull, radius and ribs most common in SA whites and skull, ulna and ribs in SA blacks. These prevalences of trauma are high, but the composition of the samples (mostly of lower socio‐economic origin) should be kept in mind. It may also be questioned whether these individuals reflect the society as a whole. It seems that the fractures in Greeks are mostly related to old age due to falls and accidents (radius and hip fractures), while the SA black sample reflects high prevalences of interpersonal violence (such as cranial vault and ulna fractures). The SA white sample follows a comparatively moderate pattern of trauma. These comparative figures may be useful when assessing trauma in other skeletal populations. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

亚裔美国史学五十年:反思与展望

回顾和检讨亚裔美国史学在过去半个世纪里所走过的道路可以发现,早期亚裔美国史学中一个最突出的问题是以意识形态为主导的一元论历史观。在近30年的时间里,学者大都仅仅从"种族歧视"这一个角度去诠释历史事件,反对从其他视野去观察亚洲移民的经历。不过,最近15年来,这个领域中出现了冲破一元论历史观束缚的趋势。新一代学者提出了白人、黑人和亚裔之间三角形关系的论点,从而否定了"有色对白种"的双重种族关系理论模式。从"跨国主义"的视野观察亚裔美国史的人认为,亚洲移民实际上具有双重的民族主义和双重文化认同,从而向"同化论"、"定居者"论和"美国化"论提出了挑战。他们还发现,日本人向美国移民和日本帝国主义的海外扩张之间有着密不可分的关系。这些新动向标志着亚裔美国史学正在逐步走向成熟。     

A microdynamics approach to geographies of violence: Mapping the kill chain in militarized conservation areas

Within segments of the overlapping fields of political ecology and political geography, there is an emerging consensus that direct physical violence is over-studied, and that it cannot be analytically separated from other forms of violence. This article argues the opposite, namely, that direct physical violence remains understudied, and that analyzing it separately is warranted to grasp its specificities. To corroborate this argument, the article examines the study of green militarization and green violence. Whereas a substantial part of this literature discusses direct physical violence, most studies focus on broader conditions and discourses of violence, without empirically demonstrating how they feed into the production of direct physical violence. Consequently, these studies do not accurately map the entire “kill chain”. A case study of violence in Virunga National Park, in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, demonstrates the analytical merits of studying direct physical violence through a “microdynamics” approach, implying the detailed study of specific acts of violence and how they were committed. Far from distracting from broader conditions, structures and histories of violence, a microdynamics approach provides an entry point for understanding how these dimensions feed into the production of direct physical violence, and how this violence interacts with other forms of violence. In addition, it allows for a more accurate understanding of how the kill chain is constituted in time and space. The article concludes that acknowledging the particularities of different modalities of violence, instead of conflating them, will significantly advance the study of geographies of violence.     

Social status, race, and the timing of marriage in Cuba's first constitutional era, 1902-1940

This article examines the practice of marriage among whites, "mestizos," blacks, Cubans, and Spaniards during the first constitutional era, focusing upon the reported ages of brides and grooms. The study consists of a quantitative examination of trends found in the records of 900 Catholic marriages celebrated in Havana during the opening decades of independence. The first major finding of the research is that according to most major indicators of status, age was negatively correlated with rank. Thus, contrary to the conclusions of studies conducted in many other contexts, those in the highest strata of society married young. Furthermore, very significant differences were detected in the marital patterns of those identified as mixed-race and those labeled as black. This finding offers empirical weight to the notion that the early-mid twentieth-century Cuban racial structure would best be characterized as tripartite, rather than binary in nature.     

Anarchy and Public Discourse: Emerson,Lincoln and the “Mobocratic Spirit” of the 1830s

Abstract

In January 1838, Emerson and Lincoln each gave a lecture on the public violence that reached a crisis with the killing of Elijah Lovejoy. For both men, mobbing represented instabilities in the process of democratization that had structural implications for public discourse. In his Lyceum Address, Lincoln argues that if mobbing became conventionalized it could legitimize an extralegal politics of force and coercion. To counterbalance the pressure he saw mobbing place on civil society, Lincoln asserts the importance of developing a culture of reverence for standards of civility in the public sphere. For Emerson, in his lecture “Heroism,” mobbing marked irrational but intentional efforts to suppress dissenting speech and thought. Especially through attacks on political reformers and other individualists, public violence distorted civil discourse and enforced both conformity and silence. For both Lincoln and Emerson, the experience of mob action challenging civil society in the 1830s marked the proximity of civil to uncivil discourse and influenced their responses to proslavery rhetoric in the 1850s. Though they reacted differently, each articulates the risks of allowing the threatened violence of proslavery rhetoric to co-opt the political structure so that civil discourse acted as a façade legitimizing mob rule.     

A Community-Based Sample of the Older Population from the 1880 and 1900 United States Manuscript Census

Abstract

Sources of nineteenth-century body mass index variation have received increased attention in economic and historical studies. Although modern body mass indexes increased during the twentieth century, nineteenth-century black and white body mass indexes were distributed symmetrically. Blacks in the Great Lakes and whites from the Southeast were more likely to be underweight, and blacks in Kentucky and whites in the Upper South and Far West were more likely to be overweight and obese. Farmers had greater body mass index values than workers in other occupations. Factors individuals did not control—such as age, race, and height—were the primary sources of nineteenth-century body mass index variation; choice characteristics—such as residence and occupations—had little to do with body mass index variation during U.S. economic development.     

Toward a Dynamic Theory of Crime and the Police: A Criminal Justice System Perspective

Abstract

The author looks at the fertility, mortality, and marriage experience of racial, ethnic, and nativity groups in the United States from the nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. The first part of the essay describes and critiques the racial and ethnic categories used in the federal census and in the published vital statistics; the second part examines the three dimensions of demographic behavior. Both absolute and relative convergence of fertility across groups has been of relatively recent origin and in large part has been due to stable, or even slightly increasing, birthrates for the majority white population combined with declining birthrates for blacks and the Asian-origin, Hispanic-origin, and Amerindian populations. This has not been true for mortality. The black population has experienced absolute convergence but relative deterioration in mortality (neonatal and infant mortality, maternal mortality, expectation of life at birth, and age-adjusted death rates), in contrast with the Amerindian and Asian-origin populations. The Asian-origin population now has age-adjusted death rates significantly lower than those for the white population. The disadvantaged condition of the black population and the deteriorating social safety net are the likely origins of this outcome. Finally, a trend toward earlier and more extensive marriage existed from about 1900 until the 1960s. At this point, coincident with the end of the baby boom, there has been a movement to later marriage for both males and females among whites, blacks, and the Hispanic-origin populations, a trend that has been more extreme in the black population, especially among females. There has also been a significant rise in percentages never-married at ages 45-54 among blacks and, to a lesser extent, among Hispanics. So here, too, there has been some divergence.     

“The Cause of This Blackness”: The Early American Republic and the Construction of Race

Abstract

Race is routinely defined as “socially constructed,” from which it follows that there was a time before its construction. What that time looked like, and how Africans were then viewed by white Americans, is difficult to perceive from a vantage point within the paradigm of race. This essay considers important but neglected cultural referents to argue that a binary distinction between black and white did not emerge on theoretical grounds until the 1780s, when Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia shrewdly redirected growing challenges to slavery into quasi-metaphysical reflections on the gulf between whites and blacks.     

Infanticide and infant abandonoment in the new South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865-1915

The Civil War and Reconstruction and the South's postbellum industrialization produced economic dislocation on a tremendous scale. One product of that economic upheaval was an increasing problem of infanticides and infant abandonments. This case study of Richmond, Virginia, examines patterns of abandonment and neonaticide as documented in records of the city almshouse and the city coroner. It demonstrates that race shaped the options available to women with problem pregnancies in that African American women had access to fewer social welfare unstitutions such as maternity homes. As a result, unmarried black women kept their out-of-wedlock babies more often than did whites, but they also committed infanticide at higher rates than did whites. Moreover, racial trends in infanticides and infant abandonment suggest that Ricomond's white working class experienced economic advancements at the turn of the twentieth century, while the city's black working class continued to live in depression-like conditions throughout the period.     

Birth control and the fertility of the U. S. Black population, 1880 to 1980

Black fertility in the U. S. declined sharply in the latter part of the 19th century and continued declining up to 1940. Common expert opinion has held that this decline in fertility was not attributable to an increase in birth control practice. Instead, experts hypothesized that the fertility decline was due almost entirely to deleterious changes in health factors among blacks. The health hypothesis is faulty because those black groups with socioeconomic advantages most conducive to good health were the very groups with the lowest fertility rates. A number of recent fertility studies seem to show fairly widespread use of birth control among blacks during the 60 years up to 1940. This widespread use did not increase precipitously in the 1930s but grew gradually over the previous 1/2 century. Knowledge and acceptance levels of birth control were also high during those years among blacks. Similarly, the experts' beliefs that birth control, even if practiced among blacks, did not have much effect on black fertility because "infective" methods were used, birth control was not practiced "effectively," and blacks started birth control practice too late in their reproductive lives have been shown by studies to have no empirical bases.     

The Transcendence of State-Sanctioned Violence and Christian Solidarity

Abstract

This essay is concerned with the nature of the human experiences of transcendence and solidarity with particular reference to state-sanctioned violence and the non-violent resistance inspired by Christian faith. With research undertaken in East Timor, the essay identifies two different forms of transcendence—one marked by mob violence; and the other by ecclesial solidarity. It explores these forms of transcendence in the context of the statesanctioned executions in East Timor that occurred in 1999 after the populace voted for independence from Indonesia, which had brutally occupied the territory from 1975 to 1999. Through the story of a group that was to be executed, the essay explores the nature of state-sanctioned violence as structured by violent transcendence; and the Christian solidarity informed by a pacific transcendence located in the victimhood of Christ. The essay claims that the anthropological insights of René Girard provide an important lens to understanding the East Timorese experience, in which I argue that statesanctioned violence was resisted through the pacific transcendence located in Christ that awakened a consciousness of the victim.     

Mapping geographies of Canadian colonial occupation: pathway analysis of murdered indigenous women and girls

This paper builds on scholarship within life course studies, particularly notions of pathway analysis, to demonstrate how such analysis can be combined with cartography in order to be applied to studies of missing and murdered indigenous women, as a means to better understand the geographies of violence they live and die in. In this sense, this work utilizes the theoretical underpinnings of pathways analysis but transforms it into an indigenized tool for narration and analysis, by linking the pathways studied with relationships to land, colonialism, and intergenerational violence. By telling the narratives of the women studied in this paper in this way, this paper demonstrates that the binaries that are frequently applied to missing and murdered indigenous women create popular knowledge on this violence that is not necessarily reflective of reality, and that when we look beyond or between these binaries, different patterns and sites of violence emerge.     

War as Feminized Labour in the Global Political Economy of Neoimperialism

ABSTRACT

This article examines the structures of international relations that facilitate political violence in postcolonial states. It explores the intersections of patriarchy and imperialism in the contemporary political economy to understand how armed conflict and political violence in postcolonial states form an integral element of the global economy of accumulation in deeply gendered ways. By focusing on the structural level of analysis, this article argues that the siting of armed conflict in postcolonial contexts serves to maintain neo-colonial relations of exploitation between the West and non-West, and is made both possible and effective through the gendering of political identities and types of work performed in the global economy. I argue here that armed conflict is a form of feminized labour in the global economy. Despite the fact that performing violence is a physically masculine form of labour, the outsourcing of armed conflict as labour in the political economy is ‘feminized’ in that it represents the flexibilization of labour and informalization of market participation. So while at the same time that this work is fulfilling hegemonic ideals of militarized masculinity within the domestic context, at the international level it actually demonstrates the ‘weakness’ or ‘otherness’ of the ‘failed’/feminized state in which this violence occurs, and legitimizes and hence re-entrenches the hegemonic relations between the core and periphery on the basis of problematizing the ‘weak’ state’s masculinity. It is through the discursive construction of the non-Western world as the site of contemporary political violence that mainstream international relations reproduces an orientalist approach to both understanding and addressing the ‘war puzzle’.     

Violence and vigilance in Nahua communities of seventeenth-century central Mexico

While historians have long studied the institutional dimensions of crime and punishment, this article examines the informal, extra-legal efforts of Nahuas and other residents of central Mexican communities to contend with violence and resolve conflicts. Residents of Nahua communities could not rely entirely on the authorities for protection and justice; rather, by being vigilant and taking matters into their own hands, they played a vital but underappreciated role in policing their communities, dealing with disorder, and preserving the peace. As such, they shouldered some of the law enforcement functions of the state apparatus. At times, their contributions could prove indispensable to the administration of justice. Their efforts not only helped to maintain public order and protect one another but they also tell us much about perceptions of acceptable behavior as well as notions of civic responsibility and, by extension, community membership and social solidarity.     

Franks,Greeks, and Saracens: violence,empire, and religion in early medieval southern Italy

This paper examines the violence between Carolingians, Saracens, and Byzantines in southern Italy during the second half of the ninth century. Traditionally these conflicts have been viewed as violence between Muslims and Christians. This paper argues that contemporary southern Italians did not perceive this violence to be religiously motivated, because they did not understand Saracens to be Muslims. Instead, these tensions were about local and foreign claims to political authority and control of territory.     

Military Anxiety and Genocide: Explaining Campaigns of Annihilation (and Their Absence)

When and why do states launch campaigns of genocide against minorities? In 2017, in a violent campaign increasingly described as genocide, the Myanmar military drove almost 700,000 Rohingya from Rakhine State into Bangladesh killing an estimated 6,700 in the first month and an unknown number overall. This assault is particularly puzzling given the international goodwill and economic benefits the regime was accruing since it opened its political system after decades of isolation. Scholars have identified a number of causes of genocide yet this literature requires development in two areas. First, few studies compare cases of genocide with situations of lower level political violence, meaning it is difficult to distinguish between societies that are simply violent from those which are genocidal. Second, despite the central role played by militaries in genocide, most studies have treated the institution as simply a tool of nationalists and other genocidal leaders rather than as actors with their own incentives and fears. In this study, I develop an explanation of genocide that places militaries at its centre. I contend that armed forces sometimes choose genocide during periods of rapid political change when they perceive a serious threat to their political and economic interests or self-appointed status as “guardian of the nation.” My study begins with a comparison between Rakhine State, Myanmar and a similarly volatile region that has avoided genocide, Assam in Northeast India. In a later stage of theory testing I examine another case of genocide, Indonesia in 1965/66.     

Access Orders and the ‘New’ New Institutional Economics of Development

This article examines the Access Order theories of development that have emerged as the latest reformulation of New Institutional Economics by Douglass North and his associates. These scholars claim that Access Order theory represents a radical break from previous models of institutional change in developing countries. They argue that at the heart of development is the problem of controlling organized violence. Two distinct social orders, the Limited Access Order and the Open Access Order, have emerged as solutions to the problem of endemic violence. This article traces the evolution of these new ideas within North's institutional theory and examines how violence is treated within the new framework. The article evaluates the underlying economic model on which the theory is based and argues that the conceptual device of the Open Access Order preserves key features of the neoclassical approach within North's work. The article contrasts the Access Order approach with the political settlements framework. To conclude, the article argues that the Access Order approach serves to strip the progressive potential out of development by ignoring how controlling violence may affect human capabilities, rights and freedom.     

Giving Up Homicide: Korowai Experience of Witches and Police (West Papua)

This paper examines the recent historical conjuncture of two regimes of violence in the lives of Korowai of West Papua: the endogenous violence of witches and witch execution, and the exogenous violence of Indonesian police. I argue that Korowai speakers' witchcraft beliefs and former practices of witch execution followed a culturally distinctive logic of shock and redemptive transaction, according to which violence could be generative of more positive qualities of relationship. By contrast, Indonesian police appear to Korowai as a qualitatively new kind of violent agent, with whom it is impossible to transact in any direct, potentially redemptive manner. In this situation, fear of police is the main reason Korowai say they have stopped executing witches. I also argue, however, that police violence appears to have had an additive local life beyond the scope of direct police involvement in local affairs. Reports, threats, figurative evocations, and emulative enactments of police violence are all now actively taken up by Korowai in their own projects of making a social world. Korowai reception of police violence has been profoundly mediated and shaped by local sociocultural principles. In this respect, the current intercultural dialogue of and about violence is one in which local and state agency have been complexly co‐constitutive.     

Gender,age and the politicisation of space during the time of political violence in KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa

This article examines the way in which the modality of the political violence between Inkatha and the United Democratic Front politicised space in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The article demonstrates how place is actively produced through everyday practices. It shows how the spatiality of the violence shifted – from the body to multiple sites of everyday life such as the school and the household and finally to the neighbourhood. Residents were drawn into the violence differentially on the basis of their gender and age, rather than political beliefs and affiliations. Places were politicised in ways that linked their meaning to the political identity of those found in that space. By presenting a spatialised analysis of the political violence, and illustrating how the production of place articulated with the co-production of political identities, this article makes a novel contribution to the existing literature on political violence in KwaZulu-Natal.