《相助》的真相

从英文原意上看,片名"the Help"意指片中那群黑人女佣,翻译成《相助》,有点望文生义,但也歪打正着,吻合了片中白人女子和黑人女性互相帮助的主题。本片的原著小说在国内翻译出版时,用的也是这一书名。影片的背景是1960年代的美国密西西比州。这个地区有着强大的种族歧视传统,黑人的生活长期笼罩在作威作福的白人阴影下,各种带有种族歧视色彩的法律     

《相助》的真桐

从英文原意上看,片名“theHelp”意指片中那群黑人女佣,翻译成《相助》,有点望文生义,但也歪打正着,吻合了片中自人女子和黑人女性旺相帮助的主题。本片的原著小说在国内翻译Ⅲ版时,用的也是这…书名。影片的背景是1960年代的美国密西西比州。这个地区有着蛆大的种族歧视传统,黑人的生活长期笼罩在作威作福的白人阴影下,各种带有种族歧视色彩的法律     

美国建国初期女性慈善社团与白人女性公民身份的初步建构——以波士顿科班社为中心的考察

19世纪初期,受国内外局势的推动,女性慈善社团在美国大量涌现。成立于1811年的波士顿科班社就是这股浪潮的产物。以科班社为代表的女性慈善社团在美国白人女性公民身份的初步建构中起到了重要作用。女性慈善社团的日常运作为白人女性提供了扮演美国公民的机会与训练。在起草与签署社团章程、向立法机构请愿并以法人身份行使法律和经济权利、通过选举和表决来解决社团事务的过程中,白人女性确立起公民意识。此外,女性慈善社团开展的活动进一步为女性成员提供了以公民身份行动的平台。通过参与慈善活动,美国白人女性能够把经济优势转化为公共影响力,关注家庭以外的公共事务,进入公共领域。公民意识的确立与公民身份的践行,为日后美国白人女性追求完整公民身份奠定了基础。     

20世纪初美国的“黑人文化热”现象

黑人自从来到美国后一直备受歧视,被视为低人一等的种族,并被排斥在美国主流社会生活之外。而在美国文化史上,黑人传统文化也一向被看作微不足道、比白人文化低一等的支流。然而,20世纪初,美国白人知识界曾出现过一阵“黑人文化热”,长期遭到鄙视的黑人传统文化第一次成为美国白人热衷的对象。还有不少白人知识分子开始严肃地看待黑人艺术,     

种族隔离制度下南非白人政府的黑人城市化政策(1920—1960)

在种族隔离制度下,南非的黑人城市化随着工业化的开展而逐步推进。对于黑人城市化,白人统治集团内部先后有过多次争论。为保持白人在政治和经济上的优势,从种族主义的意识形态出发,南非白人政府采取限制黑人城市化的政策,南非国会先后通过1923年的《土著(城市地区)法》和1952年的《土著法修订案》,作为限制黑人城市化的主要法律依据,辅以各种方式控制黑人的流动与就业,在城市空间分布上隔离白人城市与黑人城镇。限制政策滞后了黑人城市化进程,产生的负面效应至今仍然影响着南非社会经济发展。     

是否要定义新人种?——美国的“多种族人”风潮

美国的人口统计方法从建国开始不断演化。最初政府把美国人分成三大类：自由白人男性、自由白人女性和奴隶。这一人种分类方法保持了将近７０年。内战中黑奴制被取消,黑人成为自由民,于是有了黑人一族。以后人口统计中又逐渐加入了其他类别,首先是承认了美洲印第安人,...     

郑成功的黑人雇佣军

根据记载,明朝时期澳门的葡萄牙白人基本上都有4至20名黑人奴隶,随着白人的增多,澳门的黑人数目也随之增长。后来随着葡萄牙在澳门驻军,葡军中的黑人也来到了澳门。面对这些皮肤黝黑,短发厚唇的外国人,中国人很感兴趣。在惊讶这些黑人相貌的同时,中国人很快发现,这些黑人十分彪悍,而且忠于职守,在打仗的时候,往往叫嚣呼喊,奋不顾身,一     

1960年代中后期的美国“黑人权力”运动及其影响

1960年代中后期,学生非暴力协调委员会认识到黑人问题的根源在于美国的权力体制,因而提出"黑人权力"主张。"黑人权力"强调黑人必须掌控自己的事务,重新分配政治和经济权力,但受到权力机构的污蔑,遭到体制化民权领袖的批判,被视为"反向种族主义",煽动了城市骚乱。本文认为,"黑人权力"重视黑人的群体权利,颠覆白人文化对黑人的偏见论述,重塑黑人形象,强调黑人文化和传统的价值,肯定其对美国社会的重要性和与白人文化的平等。它对美国从种族主义社会转变为多元文化主义社会作出了重要贡献。     

美国印第安人五大文明部落黑人奴隶制的产生

美国五大文明部落中黑人奴隶制的产生确实受到了白人社会的影响,是白人文明开化政策留下的深刻烙印之一。然而,更为重要的是,五大部落印第安人接受黑人奴隶制的过程并非是一些模糊的文化移植过程的必然宿命,而是他们在经济模式、性别分工、血亲体制、种族观念以及政治体制等各种内在因素发生重大转变的过程中,主动地、有选择地吸收自身所需要的白人经济模式、思想观念和政治制度的结果。如果土著社会自身没有历经深刻的社会转型和变革,五大文明部落是不可能最终接受作为外来体制的黑人奴隶制的。     

非洲裔黑人选举权与查尔斯顿市的种族关系——以1876年美国南卡罗来纳州州长选举为中心

1876年南卡罗来纳州州长大选前后,查尔斯顿市多次发生种族冲突,既反映了白人至上主义者与坚决捍卫公民权、平等权和选举权的非洲裔黑人之间不可调和的种族矛盾,也揭示了民主党和共和党之间激烈的政治斗争。非洲裔黑人占查尔斯顿市人口的大多数,而种族暴力并非局限在非洲裔黑人和白人之间,也存在于支持不同政党的非洲裔黑人选民之间,使得查尔斯顿市的种族关系存在明显的地方性和复杂性特征。对查尔斯顿市种族冲突的历史考察,有助于加深对美国重建后期非洲裔黑人选举权、种族关系和白人至上主义思想意识,以及民主党和共和党之间的政治斗争等问题的理解。     

The Discursive Violence of Postcolonial Asylum in the Irish Republic

ABSTRACT

This paper situates postcolonial asylum as a dominant global encounter between the West and the Rest. Rather than a humanitarian gift, the paper argues that discursive violence of asylum regimes forces the materialization of identities, spaces and structural conditions that encamp and re-colonise asylum-seeking bodies. It first examines the global instrumentalization of images and bodies of Third World women in refugee representations to act as a humanitarian alibi that re-signifies the white saviour discourse. Moving to the Irish context where childbearing bodies of African women were targeted in a political campaign that ended birthright Citizenship for children of non-EU parents in 2004, it examines the performativity and affective entanglements of visual representations of ‘Third World Women’ and illustrates how NGO policies and projects force performances of black female bodies that exploit their representational and affective labour. Meanwhile, the material labour—of waiting— is appropriated from bodies detained in Direct Provision (a form of open asylum detention) by the asylum industry. The paper argues that postcolonial asylum is non-performative of the promise it makes, but a colonial continuity that serves a number of uses for white Western states and preserves a humanitarian face while detracting critical attention from the root causes of forced displacement from the South—necropolitics in the South.     

Can't I be seen? Can't I be heard? Black women queering politics in Newark

What does it mean for a black female to negotiate urban space? How is her body read, her politics enacted, and her agency understood and interpreted? How do black women use their bodies and identities to challenge structural intersectionality in US cities? To answer these questions, I explore how black women embraced a set of oppositional spatial practices to resist the intersectional effects of misogyny, homo/transphobia, racism, and poverty in Newark, New Jersey. I reconstruct the creation of the Newark Pride Alliance, a local lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and queer coalition that mobilized in 2003 and 2004, after the death of Sakia Gunn. Exploring migrations between ‘black women,’ ‘black queer’ and ‘black feminist,’ I examine how black women respatialized social capital and enacted resistance. Through semi-structured interviews and frame analysis, I explore how black women forged new relationships between queer youth and black vernacular institutions, and created political spaces in which honest engagement of issues of gender violence, poverty, and power could take place.     

‘Writing’ Black Womanhood in the Early Cuban Republic, 1904–16

This article explores the intersection of race, class and womanhood during the early years of the Cuban Republic. It focuses on the writings of elite women who published in the black press between 1904 and 1916. While legal reforms and the expansion of the educational system facilitated new gender expectations, racial ideologies positioned upper‐class white women as the standard of ideal womanhood. I argue that elite women of African descent employed modernising gender norms in order to counter anti‐black racism and to affirm their identification with upper‐class whites. In particular, they published articles that promoted the dominant values regarding marriage, education and public comportment. They disparaged unmarried unions and the practice of African cultural traditions among the labouring poor. Elite black women's writings drew from the model of the enlightened caretaker also to engage broader debates regarding feminism and black civic unity. Yet their emphasis on ideals that promoted white superiority helped reinforce the anti‐black tenets of Cuban citizenship they hoped to undermine. By analysing elite black women's articles, poetry and letters, the article demonstrates the importance of understanding how women of African descent forged an intellectual trajectory, and thus contributes to the historiography of gendered racial ideologies in Latin America and the Caribbean.     

The Perils of the Back Seat: Date Rape,Race and Gender in 1950s America

Dating among white American teenagers in the 1950s caused parents considerable concern, as it represented disturbing developments in sexual expectations. While the rhetoric surrounding marriage celebrated traditional gender roles and monogamy, Americans bemoaned social and moral decay, caused in part by women's encroachment on male prerogatives. Sexual experience for boys increasingly became a defining gender characteristic and a means of achieving manhood as well. Ideas about proper marital norms and studies of dating practices among young people naturalised male aggression as proof of masculinity, which made girls, even ‘respectable ones’, vulnerable to violence from their dates. As teens' acceptance of going steady became more widespread, older racialised narratives of sexual danger evolved to incorporate new dating trends. Whereas American, and especially southern white, women knew the dangers of the supposed ‘black beast rapist’, they learnt during the 1950s that a special danger could confront them in the back seat of cars, despite the presence of their white, male date. Even with a white protector, white women remained vulnerable to violence on dates, whether from black men or from their white date. As dating conventions loosened, white women found that that the perils of the back seat only increased.     

Unpacking the landscape of female sex tourism in Kenya: a film analysis of Paradise: Love

This article examines Paradise: Love (2012, Dir. Ulrich Seidl), a compelling filmic account of the problematics of race, ethnicity, gender, and nation that organize contemporary accounts of female sex tourism. The storyline and visual imagery of the film positions Kenya – and a Eurocentric, homogenized, and reductive (mis)understanding of parts of ‘Africa’ – as an imagined site of racial and sexual adventure for older white Western women seeking intimate relationships with a category of local black men, many of whom enter into these sexual relationships in order to supplement personal and family economic shortfalls. This economy of intimate exchange is positioned as a trade of these black Kenyan men’s desire for money, local status, and the potential to travel to the West, for white Western women’s desire for sexual fulfillment from young black men’s bodies and their assumed sexual prowess. Deconstructing the discourses of female sex tourism through Paradise: Love centres the visual and representational components of processes of racialization and sexualization, wherein beach boys and white Western women gaze upon and ‘Other’ each other through essentialist and fetishized understandings of racial and sexual difference. In focusing on the power dynamics of female sex tourism in particular, the film plays up the shock value of women sexually exploiting men, pushing viewers to question: who counts as a sex tourist? Ultimately, this article seeks to enrich and extend scholarship that troubles intersecting power structures that shape and inform transnational inter-racial intimacies within economies of eroticized exchange.     

The changing relationship between education and marriage in the United States, 1940-2000

In 1940, when gender specialization was high, there was a negative relationship between education and marriage for women. College-educated women were least likely to be currently married and most likely to be never married. Declines in specialization were accompanied by a transition in this relationship. By 2000, when gender specialization was low, there was a positive relationship between education and marriage for women. College-educated women were most likely to be currently married, in part because they were more likely to stay married or remarry after divorce or widowhood. This transition occurred earlier and more completely for black women than for white women. These changes suggest that the relationship between education and marriage is shaped in part by the gender-role context.     

Black sisterhood: The situation of urban aboriginal women and their relationship to the white women's movement 1

The article argues that Aboriginal women in urban aboriginal society experience very different oppressions than do white women in urban white society. Aboriginal women believe that their greatest oppression is racism not sexism. When their objective conditions are examined it becomes obvious that this is indeed so. In fact Aboriginal women are statistically better educated and better employed than are Aboriginal men. Other economic and societal factors combine to produce a situation whereby a black woman's status within her own society is very different to that of her white sisters. Black women are more likely to be heads of household; more likely to be political leaders and less likely to be child‐burdened than their white counterparts. Consequently women's movement demands such as abortion, child‐care, the right to work and sexual liberation are not given high priority by the Aboriginal women's movement. Aboriginal women's demands stem from the politics of poverty and discrimination. These are caused by racism not sexism.     

A Woman's Place in the Crab Processing Industry of Eastern Carolina

Traditionally, most of the pickers used in the crab processing industry of rural Eastern Carolina have been women from the local area, both black and white, while the managerial staff has comprised white women related through kinship to the white, male crab house owners. In recent years, however, this recruitment strategy has changed. Following the lead of the regional poultry industry, the crab houses are now bringing in Mexican workers under the H2-B visa program. Unlike many of the Mexican migrant workers coming into the USA, the crab labor force is made up of women, about half of whom are married with children. This article provides a case study of the ensuing dual labor structure within the crab processing industry. Utilizing in-depth interviews with the employers and employees of the Luther Lewis and Son crab house, the authors ask: What are the contours of inclusiveness and exclusiveness within and without the crab house?     

Rewriting apartheid South Africa: race and space in Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo’s novels*

This article employs oppositional black geography as a lens to examine spatiality in the novels of two black South African women writing during apartheid, Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo. In analyzing Tlali’s Muriel at Metropolitan and Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die, it argues that the authors used a critical spatial analysis of the nation to critique apartheid and its oppressive policies. It holds that by insisting on authoring their own worlds in a country that sought to deny them creative agency, Tlali and Ngcobo carved out intellectual space that enabled them to critique dominant ideologies of Afrikaner nationalism and white supremacy, while imagining and writing alternatives to a nation to which their relationships were primarily ones of disavowal and subjugation. Both Tlali and Ngcobo render visible the fissures within the seemingly naturalized apartheid sites they construct in their fiction, revealing the inherent contradictions and injustices of apartheid spatiality. Through their fiction, they were thus engaged in situated knowledge production and a reconfiguration of apartheid space into a more socially just place. In narrating subaltern discourses in their novels from the standpoint of those most oppressed by apartheid law and ideology and by creatively engaging the spatiality of apartheid, Tlali and Ngcobo offer new modes for reading the nation, valuable for elucidating the ways in which the national space genders black women, and how black women, in turn shape and reshape that space.     

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.