Intra‐European Racism in Nineteenth‐Century Anthropology

Nowadays the term “racism” is usually applied in the context of relationships between Europeans and non‐European “others”. During the nineteenth century scientific ideas about innate human differences were also applied extensively to various European populations. This was partly due to a category confusion whereby nations came to be regarded as biologically distinct. The origins of “scientific” racism were connected with the use of race as an explanation of history, and with the rise of physiognomy and phrenology. The development of “craniology” was paralleled and reinforced by ideological writings about “Nordic” racial superiority. In times of conflict such as the Franco‐Prussian war, absurd racial theories emerged and social Darwinist anthropologists connected race and class. Such ideas persisted well into the twentieth century and reached their apogee in Nazism.     

Economic fears of mass migration from southern Italy in early twentieth century America

ABSTRACT

Economic fears in the early twentieth century America about Italian immigration united trade unions and white collar workers and were motivated by reasons that ranged from the belief that migrants were disrupting the labour market and were temporary opportunist earners, unwilling to integrate and living in isolated communities, to the idea that southern Italians did not offer sufficient human capital: they were mainly illiterate, and had high dropout rates in schools, and were widely believed to have children with mental disabilities. These American fears were wildly overstated, however. First, Southern Italian migrants had to undergo a two-stage positive selection for literacy, while, secondly only 28.4 per cent of the massive incoming flow of Italians decided to stay; most Italian immigrants chose to return to their country of origin and the minority who remained did not delay long to join in the American melting pot.     

American Presbyterians,Freedmen's Missions,and the Nile Valley: Missionary History,Racial Orders,and Church Politics on the World Stage

In the second half of the nineteenth century, American Presbyterian “home” and “foreign” missions developed parallel and mutually reinforcing policies towards freed slaves in Egypt, Sudan, and the U.S.A. as well as towards Egypt's indigenous Christians, the Copts. Yet the racial ideologies and social hierarchies of these three countries reflected distinct historical trajectories of migration and conquest. In the Nile Valley, American missionaries struggled to understand, address, and sometimes revise Egyptian and Sudanese social hierarchies, which they found alternately idiosyncratic or unjust. This essay conjectures that these interactions, in the long run, induced the Nile Valley missionaries to confront the lingering injustices and incongruities in American social hierarchies, particularly in the mid‐ to late twentieth century. In this way, the “foreign” mission experience had a backflow for missionaries and their church by raising questions about American racial orders and by strengthening a commitment to civil rights and social justice agendas.     

An Archive of Difference: Syrian Women,the Peddling Economy and US Social Welfare, 1880–1935

Historians have scrutinised the racial classifications of Arab immigrants in the census, in immigration documents and in early‐twentieth‐century naturalisation cases. However, recent scholarship has shown that other archives – ones that do not focus on interactions with the law – reveal a different process of Arab‐American racialisation. This article contends that looking in other archival spaces, specifically the US social welfare archive, shows how ideas about gender, sexual and class difference constituted early Arab‐American racialisation. Social welfare reformers in institutional settings, including the International Institute of Boston, the National Conference of Social Work and the pages of the social work periodical The Survey, systematically linked Syrian labouring practices with notions of dependency, sexual and gender deviance, and Orientalist difference. Syrian women were racialised through their participation in the peddling economy – a network of peddlers, suppliers and domestic labourers that sustained a widespread profession of the early Syrian American community. Syrian women's labouring practices conflicted with white middle‐class femininity and posed a threat to Syrian claims of whiteness. This analysis demonstrates the centrality of gender, sexuality and class to studies of early Arab America and demonstrates how Arab migrant women's labouring practices affected their communities’ standing in the American context.     

The End of Third Italy As We Knew It?

Italian industrial districts of “Third Italy” stand as landmarks and standard points of reference in Anglophone economic geography and planning studies. A whole series of analytical and policy‐oriented concepts have been born, inspired in part or totally from Third Italy, summarized in what is known as “New Regionalism”. There are, however, many partial truths and important missing issues in the discourse on Italian industrial districts and some important post‐2000 developments seem to contradict the dominant mythology around them. Among these developments mergers and acquisitions, de‐localization and the work on non‐EU immigrants seem to mark a new phase in their history, questioning the celebrated characteristics of the past.     

Idylls of the piney woods: health and race in southeastern Louisiana, 1878–1956

Scholars have investigated the important connections between racial identity, geography, and environment. Frequently these studies have focused on the location of noxious industries, questions of environmental justice, or segregation of racialized groups in areas of deleterious environmental conditions. In this paper, I argue that beneficial environmental conditions can also be closely tied with racial identity and that racial identity in turn can influence perceptions of the environment. These connections are evident in southern Louisiana—specifically St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. St. Tammany Parish, located in the piney woods of southeastern Louisiana, served as a health resort for New Orleanians seeking refuge from yellow fever and for other Americans attempting to restore their health. Residents and medical specialists understood the healthful qualities of the parish to emanate from the fragrance of the pine trees and the restorative waters. St. Tammany Parish's reputation for health, however, only applied to people with a white racial identity, despite the fact that St. Tammany Parish had a significant black population. White residents within the parish reserved tuberculosis sanitaria, health clinics, and access to natural springs for white patrons only, even amid fears concerning illness among black residents. Additionally, late nineteenth and early twentieth century medical specialists pointed to morality, criminality, and racial characteristics in their determination of the causes of illness.     

A community out of balance: nationality law and migration politics in the history of post-unification Italy

Italian government policies concerning foreign immigration have to be understood in the context of laws on nationality. Since the time of unification, Italian laws on nationality have been closely determined by policies on emigration and immigration. As a result, the laws regarding the nationality status of Italian emigrants returning from abroad, and for foreign immigrants in Italy, have on the whole been determined by the procedures adopted for the acquisition or deprivation of Italian nationality. This is a subject that has not been studied and this article reconstructs the principal stages in the development of Italian nationality laws from the early twentieth century to the present. This reveals that Italian nationality law treats Italian emigrants and foreign immigrants in very different ways. Both the legal system and government policy has in the past been extremely generous towards the former and has made both the preservation and the reacquisition of nationality relatively easy for Italian nationals, even before there were practical motives for this (e.g. the right for Italians living overseas to vote). When it comes to foreign immigrants, however, Italian law is amongst the most restrictive in western Europe. The article concludes by arguing that this underlying imbalance is a major but largely ignored weakness in Italian democracy.     

Unsightly urban menaces and the rescaling of residential segregation in the United States

In this article, the author uses a slum clearance project in Lexington, Kentucky, as a lens through which to examine the spatial dynamics of racial residential segregation during the first half of the twentieth century. At the time, urban migration and upward socioeconomic mobility on the part of African Americans destabilized extant residential segregation patterns. Amid this instability, various spatial practices were employed in the interest of maintaining white social and economic supremacy. The author argues that such practices were indicative of a thoroughgoing reinvention of urban socio-spatial order that in turn precipitated the vastly expanded scale of residential segregation still found in U.S. cities today. Evidence of this reinvented ordering of urban space lies in the rendering of some long-standing African American neighborhoods as “out of place” within it and the use of slum clearance to remove the “menace” such neighborhoods posed to it.     

The Dilemmas of the Pious Biographer: Missionary Islam and the Oceanic Hagiography

As Islam was transformed into a missionary religion in the modern sense around the turn of the twentieth century, three questions were faced by almost all writers called on to publicise the deeds of the new breed of mobile Muslim pietists: How can a biographer turn the often tedious chores of the missionary into exciting reading? How can the humdrum tasks of founding mosques and schools be turned into the narrative trappings of a Muslim hero? And how can a modern Muslim be portrayed as a saint without recourse to “superstitious” miracle stories? The essay addresses these questions through an examination of an Urdu biography written to publicise the deeds of an Indian Muslim missionary to South Africa. In view of the revival of interest in biography, through inspecting one such missionary organisation's understanding of the life of its founder, the essay explores the necessary compromises involved in writing a life at any given moment in history.     

20世纪美国少数族裔的命运变迁

美国的少数族裔主要包括黑人、拉美裔人、亚裔人和原土著印第安人。20世纪是美国少数族裔经历重大命运转折的历史时期：20世纪上半期．各少数族裔深受种族歧视之苦,毫无权利可言．生活一贫如洗;从50年代中期开始,少数族裔开展了民权运动,自此处境有了很大的改善,然而种族问题在美国并没有得到最终解决;90年代以来,美国的种族矛盾再次激化。可见,在将来很长时间里,种族问题仍将是美国国内最棘手的社会问题,少数族裔要在美国社会取得真正的平等,其道路是漫长而艰辛的。     

Globalizing a Race to Publish an Encyclopedia

In 1912, Daniel Alexander Payne Murray published a prospectus for his “Historical and Biographical Encyclopedia of the Colored Race throughout the World.” He promised to publish what literary historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., would describe as the “Grail” for black scholars. As Murray planned his encyclopedia in the first decade of the twentieth century, persons of African descent in the United States were killed and assaulted because of their race, and racial identification was as critical an issue as it was also ambiguous. Moreover, despite its ambiguity, or perhaps, because of it, race, in 1912 and since the Naturalization Act of 1790, had everything to do with American citizenship. In Murray’s time, whether a person was identified on the one hand as “white” or “octoroon” versus an identity as “black,” “Negro,” “mulatto,” or “quadroon” influenced whether or not that person could exercise his rights as an American citizen (with her rights barely entering the question). However, race, as Murray understood with its skin color codes shading the meaning of American citizenship, was much more a social construction than it was biological evidence of a person’s hereditary origins. Formulating a strategy in support of black American citizenship, Murray developed a global interpretation of the black American experience from a pragmatically ambiguous cultural practice to compose an identity for himself, his people, and his proposed encyclopedia.     

Hardworking Newcomers and Generations of Poverty: Poverty Discourse in Central Washington State

This research is part of a project that aims to reinterpret geographies of poverty in the American Northwest by focusing on the intersections of cultural and political–economic processes that produce poverty differences. This paper contributes to this aim by unpacking poverty beliefs by race at the local county level. This qualitative analysis is grounded in a brief discussion of the political economy of Kittitas County in Central Washington State, which provides space to analyze the theoretical linkages between structural and cultural constructions of poverty differences. Specifically, this paper argues that first generation “hardworking” Hispanic immigrants embody the “working poor”, while individual explanations of poverty are articulated as the “intergenerational poor”, who are racialized as white and choose poverty as a lifestyle. In this vein, many local residents use the marker of “generation” to distinguish between white, lower class individuals who choose to be poor from a group of Hispanic newcomers whose poverty stems from structural forces such as non‐living‐wage jobs and discrimination. This forms one part of a larger strategy to “blame the individual” for the existence of white poverty. This analysis poses new theoretical insights into the intersection between difference markers such as race, class, and generation and contributes to the literature on racial differences in poverty explanations. The geographical specificity of poverty discourse argues for further grounding of the poverty literature in material conditions, which will allow for more nuanced understanding of the creation and persistence of poverty in poor communities.     

Suppressing the Mad Elephant: Missionaries,Lamas, and the Mediation of Sacred Historiographies in the Tibetan Borderlands

The late-nineteenth century was a time of Protestant missionary enthusiasm for the “great closed land” of Tibet. Their prodigious, oftentimes proto-ethnographic, writings continue to provide scholars with archives that document missionary perspectives on Inner Asian society and religion, but few sources have yet emerged that allow for these to be read alongside Tibetan accounts of Christian-Buddhist encounters. This article undertakes such a parallel reading of four accounts of an unsuccessful attempt by the British missionary Cecil Polhill to convert an eastern Tibetan Buddhist abbot, Māyang Pa??ita, in late 1889. Understanding these texts as conflicting sacred historiographies, we note that these Christian and Buddhist writers shared a commitment to writing and to particular modes of emotional, material, and logical mediation as the “correct” path to religious certainty. Differences in genre, however, lead more to mockery and misunderstanding than to each side’s desired transformation of the other..     

HEGEMONY,IMPERIALISM, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RELIGION IN EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA1

Edward Said's concept of Orientalism portrays the high tide of nineteenth‐century imperialism as the defining moment in the establishment of a global discursive hegemony, in which European attitudes and concepts gained a universal validity. The idea of “religion” was central to the civilizing mission of imperialism, and was shaped by the interests of a number of colonial actors in a way that remains visibly relevant today. In East and Southeast Asia, however, many of the concerns that statecraft, law, scholarship, and conversion had for religion transcended the European impact. Both before and after the period of European imperialism, states used religion to engineer social ethics and legitimate rule, scholars elaborated and enforced state theologies, and the missionary faithful voiced the need for and nature of religious conversion. The real impact of this period was to integrate pre‐existing concerns into larger discourses, transforming them in the process. The ideals of national citizenship and of legal and scholarly impartiality recast the state and its institutions with a modernist sacrality, which had the effect of banishing the religious from the public space. At the same time, the missionary discourse of transformative conversion located it in the very personal realm of sincerity and belief. The evolution of colonial‐era discourses of religion and society in Asia since the departure of European imperial power demonstrates both their lasting power and the degree of agency that remains implicit in the idea of hegemony.     

当代俄罗斯史学中动乱学研究的新趋向

苏联解体后,俄罗斯学界开始反思20世纪初的革命,在深化对17世纪初大动乱研究的基础上,形成一种以“动乱”取代“革命”的话语,采用多学科综合研究的方法,构建以“动乱—帝国”为模型的俄国国家系统性危机理论体系的动乱学研究范式。该范式强调,17世纪初、20世纪初和20世纪末发生的历史事件是俄国国家制度的三次系统性危机(即动乱),前两次危机都以建立帝国而结束,俄国历史在“动乱—帝国”的周期性节律中循环。动乱学的提出,是21世纪“俄罗斯学”和“帝国学”研究热潮下的产物,也是一部分俄国学者对当前俄罗斯向何处去的一种回答。但作为建构一门新学科的尝试,其学科体系尚待进一步深化。     

THE EMERGENCE OF STRATIGRAPHIC ARCHAEOLOGY IN MEDITERRANEAN EUROPE

In Italian classical archaeology, the definitive adoption of the stratigraphic excavation method occurred later than in other European countries. This methodological shift took place in Italy in the 1970s. We aim to scrutinize some points of the established historiographical reconstruction. We focus on three scholars regarded as “key figures” in the birth of Italian stratigraphic archaeology, yet all of the first half of the twentieth century, Giacomo Boni, Nino Lamboglia, and Luigi Bernabò Brea. We examine the origin of their stratigraphic approach and thus their relationship with prehistoric research. This is also an opportunity to reflect upon the conceptual and methodological transfer from one type of archaeology to another. In general, through comparison of these scholars, we aim to highlight some key factors in the establishment of a stratigraphic method in the history of archaeology.     

Illegible ethnicity and the invention of Scots-Irish narratives on the stages of Belfast and Appalachia

Theatrical stages have long been home to performances of identity, creating and sustaining legible visions of various peoples and groups for their audiences. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, the playwright/actor Dion Boucicault popularised the “stage Irishman” for Irish and American audiences alike, thus contributing to the invention of “Irish-America”. This paper examines a similar attempt in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to query the definition of a distinct group of Irish-Americans: the Scots-Irish. Productions from Belfast, Northern Ireland, as well as from the southern Appalachian Mountains, demonstrate how the illegibility of the Scots-Irish – in other words, their status as a non-recognisable, incoherent segment of the white population in the USA – allows for narratives about this group to be highly malleable. Contemporary productions of the Scots-Irish story demonstrate the ways in which ethnic identities emerge as constructions of past and present, memory and history, and politics and culture.     

‘Western Perversions’ at the Threshold of Felicity: The European Prostitutes of Galata‐Pera (1870–1915)

Istanbul in the late nineteenth century grew to be a hub of the so‐called “white slave trade”, the trafficking of women predominantly from the Eastern Habsburg provinces to brothels from South America to East Asia. As a strong movement to suppress this trafficking grew in Europe, the Habsburg authorities’ incapability to suppress the trade endangered Austria‐Hungary’s standing in the Eastern Question, that is, its attempt to play a significant role in the Ottoman territories. The article investigates how contemporary discourses on gender, imperialism and nationalism combined to turn the issue of Austrian prostitutes in Istanbul into an issue that was strongly contested especially between the Ottoman authorities and the Habsburg diplomats at the beginning of the twentieth century.     

The Communist Hypothesis and Revolutionary Capitalisms: Exploring the Idea of Communist Geographies for the Twenty‐first Century

Abstract: This essay starts from the presumption that “the communist hypothesis” is still a good one, but argues that the idea of communism requires urgent re‐thinking in light of both the “obscure” disaster of twentieth century really existing socialism and the specific conditions of twenty‐first century capitalism. I explore the contours of the communist hypothesis, chart the characteristics of the revolutionary capitalism of the twenty‐first century and consider how our present predicament relates to the urgency of rethinking and reviving the communist hypothesis. Throughout, I tentatively suggest a number of avenues that require urgent intellectual and theoretical attention and interrogate the present condition in light of the possibilities for creating communist geographies for the twenty‐first century.     

Irish Domestic Servants, ‘Biddy’ and Rebellion in the American Home, 1850–1900

This essay looks at the role that Anglo‐American women played in governing their Irish immigrant domestic servants and at the racial and gendered meanings that were attached to servitude. In the second half of the nineteenth century, female Irish Catholic immigrants predominated in domestic service employment in the north‐eastern United States. Newspaper and magazine articles portrayed the home as a site of conflict where Protestant, middle‐class families clashed with Irish Catholic ‘peasant’ girls newly arrived in the US. Employers depicted ‘Bridget’ or ‘Biddy’, the collective nickname given to Irish domestic servants, as insubordinate, unrefined and prone to violent outbursts. While reliant on domestic service for wages, female Irish immigrants understood that service represented racialised labour in the United States and was viewed as an occupation befitting non‐white populations.