Historical Archaeology and the Post-Columbian World of North America

Historical archaeology, with its interest in material culture and its use of the broader perspectives of anthropology and anthropological archaeology, has contributed to a distinctive understanding of the North American experience. Historical archaeologists have, to varying degrees, investigated the material traces of class, race, gender, and state formation. These studies provide an understanding of the origin of many of the social practices that undergird modern culture, a necessary, though neglected, case in a unified anthropological archaeology's goal of writing innovative world histories.     

‘Ain’t I a feminist?’: the politics of gender violence,anti-violence,and education in Oakland,CA

This article focuses on the ways gender violence politics become reduced to liberal narratives of victimization in contemporary U.S. deployment of feminist identity politics, within academic and activist discourses. Such victimization narratives, I argue, exploit suffering and reproduce social stratification between a growing middle class in the academy and poor black people outside of it. This article draws from moments in California’s Bay area when questions of feminism, gender violence, and anti-violence in schools arose. In each case, left feminists had an opportunity to reshape these questions towards new political paradigms and new academic discourses. Instead, amidst the ‘safety’ of left discourse and practice, each moment confronted contradictory silences that called into question such ‘safety’ and made generative political movement impossible. I analyze the dynamics of this silencing as constitutive of the co-optation of feminist identity politics within a capitalist university that reproduces an oppressive race and class order. We face a problem of language to adequately explain and disrupt the incapacity for collective social change that victimhood, identity politics, and reformism have produced. Each instance I present function as moments of history making from which we may reflect and strategize forward movement against capitalist oppression and racial dehumanization.     

How is Australianness represented by prime ministers?: Prime ministerial and party rhetoric of race,class, and gender on Australia Day and Anzac Day, 1990–2017

ABSTRACT

Australia Day and Anzac Day, held on January 26 and April 25 annually, are key moments used by prime ministers to share, shape, and reproduce their understanding of what and whom is representative of a unique Australian identity and nationalism. This paper uses qualitative and quantitative methods with content analysis to evaluate and compare prime ministerial and party rhetoric in their Australia Day and Anzac Day speeches between 1990 and 2017 regarding class and economic relations, gender and sexuality, and race and national identity. We ask: How have prime ministers as reflexive actors used their speeches on Australia Day and Anzac Day to represent what it means to be Australian? The study reveals that despite prime ministers sometimes using intentionally inclusive discourses, they simultaneously reproduce a classless, hetero-masculine, and Anglocentric Australianness as a normative representation of national identity in Australian society.     

Race,Class and Politics in Peninsular Malaysia: The General Election of 2008

Racial politics have bedevilled peninsular Malaysia since independence in 1957, largely sustained by a ruling coalition of partners sharing power unequally, in a consociational government. The effect of a racialised practice over fifty years is the institutionalisation of the politics of ethnic pluralism, each component driven by its own internal dynamic and cultural logic: for the Chinese it is the politics of economic security, for the Tamils the politics of religion and caste, and for the Malays incipient class antagonisms that are historically rooted in a feudal society. In the general election of 2008, there was an unprecedented swing of votes across the ethnic divide against the ruling government, resulting in the loss of five state governments to an opposition coalition espousing multiculturalism and the loss of the government's two-thirds majority in Parliament for the first time. However, we argue that these developments do not signal the beginning of the end of racial politics in peninsular Malaysia. Instead, the opposition has skilfully recoded multiculturalism as social justice and accountability in racial terms, and effectively communicated this to an essentially racialised electorate at a time when Malays, Chinese and Tamils had lost faith in the ruling government's ability to address deep-seated grievances specific to each of these communities.     

American home: Predatory mortgage capital and neighbourhood spaces of race and class exploitation in the United States

Predatory home mortgage lending has become a central concern for housing research, public policy and community activism in US cities. Regulatory attempts to stop abuses, however, are undermined by claims that ‘predatory’ cannot be defined or distinguished from legitimate subprime lending, and claims that the industry performs a public service by meeting the needs of low‐income, high‐risk consumers (many of them racially marginalized) who would have been denied credit in previous years. We evaluate these claims in historical‐geographical context, drawing on David Harvey's theory of class‐monopoly rent to analyse what is new (and what is not) in contemporary financial exploitation. We use a mixed‐methods approach to (1) provide econometric measures of subprime racial targeting and disparate impact that cannot be blamed on the supposed deficiencies of borrowers, (2) qualitatively assess the rationale for judging particular subprime practices and lenders as predatory, and (3) trace the connections between local practices and transnational investment networks. The fight against predatory lending cannot succeed, we argue, without a renewed analytical and strategic emphasis on the class dimensions of financial exploitation and racial‐geographical discrimination.     

Producing Vancouver's (hetero)normative nightscape

The article argues, through an examination of Vancouver's entertainment district as an actively produced ‘civilizing’ space dominated by private enterprise, that it is important to understand the ‘mainstream’ as a grounded site which produces, maintains and reiterates the moral contours of heterosexuality (among other things) within the city. Nightclubs in particular, experienced as spaces of hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity, offer a prime example of how the union of governmentality, surveillance and private enterprise work together in the maintenance and regulation of social conformity. Drawing upon an ethnographic study from 2005 to 2006, I explore the entertainment district and highlight young adults' perceptions of its nightlife economy and how space, hegemonic sexuality and nightlife collide.     

Collapsing contexts: social networking technologies in young people’s nightlife

In the latest discussions of children and young people’s new geographies of leisure and pleasure, one controversial issue has been how digital technologies co-produce and reconfigure young people’s everyday worlds. This article draws on semi-structured interviews with 40 young people who regularly use social networking technologies in their nightlife experiences in Zurich and Lausanne, two nightlife hubs in Switzerland. Informed by Danah Boyd’s concepts of ‘collapsing contexts’ and ‘imagined audiences’, this article enables a critical engagement with young people’s emerging understanding of their nightlife contexts, which are increasingly permeated by networking technologies. I show how social networking spaces facilitate the coming together, or collapse, of various social contexts which induce young people to imagine multiple audiences, including authority figures, in their nightlife practices. These collapsing contexts and imagined audiences, I argue, present new perspectives on debates about control and surveillance in young people’s contemporary urban nightlife.     

Challenging Englishness from the racial margins: William Macready's Irishman in London; Or; The Happy African

William Charles Macready's farce The Irishman in London; Or; The Happy African (1792) can be read as an exploration of Englishness in its relationship to Irishness as presented on the London stage in the period following the French Revolution. This article examines Macready's play as a critique of the common identification of Irishness with blackness that uses stock characters and attitudes to examine English identity. Through a marriage plot displaced from the traditional romantic heroes onto their Irish and black servants, we see English as a commercial identity rather than a cultural one. Linking race to culture and culture to nationality, Macready's play presents Irishness and blackness as culturally rich while calling into question the content of Englishness.